I traveled with Tim Weihs, someone I actually knew only indirectly. He was starting a new job on the East Coast, and wanted to travel in Alaska before he left. A mutual friend knew that I was also interested in going there, so she suggested that perhaps we consider going together. He was a pretty good travelling partner, except maybe for the SNORING, but overall things worked out quite well.
We flew out Friday 7/14. Stayed overnight in Seattle, then took this "puddle jumper" flight up the Alaskan Panhandle, with stops in Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, then finally Juneau. The towns up there are small. The "airport" consisted of a tarmac, a building, a metal detector, and a 10 space gravel parking lot.
Our first afternoon in Juneau we rented mountain bikes and went riding. We rode south of town to see an active Salmon run, which was really amazing. Wall to wall fish, all about as big as your leg, fighting there way upstream. After that, we rode back through town and went north to a glacier coming out of the mountains. It is amazing how blue the ice is! We had been warned to watch out for the "lonely mountain women" that would find us easy "prey", but (sadly) we didn't have any problems.
One thing I didn't realize about Alaska before is that most of it (at least where we went) is a rainforest. Fortunately, that fact was well advertised when we started planning our trip. I certainly got a lot of use out of my raingear. Sure enough, it rained lightly for most of the second half of our bike trip, giving us one of those oh-so-stylish biking mud-stripes up our backside. It was still fun, though, except maybe when sitting back down on the seat after standing or stopping. Come to think of it, perhaps that is what kept those mountain women at bay...
The next day we went hiking. Our goal was to do Mt Juneau, a 3400' mountain just behind the town. True to form, it was raining. We hiked up along a river, through 3 basins, and up along the ridge line to ~3200', but by then we were in the clouds, and visibility was really bad. Since we didn't have any trail to follow at that point, and we certainly weren't going to have a view of much of anything from the top, we decided it would be smarter to head back down then to accidentally end up on some alternate ridge taking us out on a glacier or something. We were totally soaked again, but it was worth it.
After some time in the laundromat drying out gear (hiking boots in the dryer make a heck of a racket!), we left the next day for sea kayaking in Glacier Bay. This flight was even more cool -- a four seat Cessna powered by what sounded like a lawnmower. It was a 30 minute flight out, ending at the smallest airport yet. The "terminal" here consisted of a tool shed, open on both sides, with a scale for weighing luggage. We took a cab out the 12 mile dirt road to the park, then picked up our bear-resistent food canisters and attended the kayaking orientation.
It was at the orientation that we learned that, one: if you fall out of the boat, you've got very little time (~15 min) before the cold water starts to really get to you, and two: high/low tides in Glacier Bay span about +20 to -5 feet. The tide differential leads to some serious currents going in and out of the bay, so you generally don't want to be paddling against them.
The next morning, we loaded our gear and headed out on the tour boat that would take us and our kayak to the dropoff point up the bay. They literally tossed our stuff over the side, put out a ladder for us to climb down, then motored off. It took us a while to figure out how to get all our gear into the kayak, but we eventually managed it -- with only two dry bags strapped over the top of the boat.
We hadn't made it a hundred yards when we saw our first whale. He started on one side of the boat, so we stopped and watched for his next breathing surface, only to have him come up directly behind us. We couldn't see him when he was under, but he must have passed directly under our kayak. We continued our way up the bay about 12 miles, then pulled out to make camp. Again, there was a light rain the whole day, and all that night. If you ever go to Alaska, plan to get wet!
The next day we broke camp and headed North again. We started seeing our first icebergs floating down the bay that morning, and they became more and more common the farther North we went. After another 12 miles, we reached a point between two tidal glaciers and again made camp for the night. We actually had a break in the weather, though, and saw our first real sunshine most of that afternoon.
The next morning we awoke to clear blue skies for the first time! We hiked up to the glacier in shorts and T-shirts, found a nice spot behind a rock (the wind off the glacier was still mighty cold!), and worked on our tans while waiting for some calving action.
The first hour we saw a few chair sized chunks of ice fall off. The next hour we saw a car-sized chunk fall into the water, which was pretty spectacular. The next hour we saw the highlight of our whole trip -- one whole slice, the entire height of the glacier (I'd guess ~250' high), peeled off and started to fall. It's difficult to describe how awesome it was, but it was big enough that it took about 7 seconds for the fall and main splash to complete. It was sort of like watching one of the buildings being demolished -- seemingly in slow motion. When it hit the water, the splash was even bigger then the iceberg. I just hope the pictures turn out.
It was now early afternoon, so we had to start working our way South back down the bay. Unfortunately, our late start meant we were paddling against the tide. The good news was that the clear weather held up very nicely. The bad news was that with clear skies comes wind, which in our case was blowing into our face. We fairly quickly figured out that going against the wind is even worse than the tide.
This is when all the running I've been doing became really aggravating! My legs were in pretty good shape, and they weren't anything but dead weight shoved into the kayak. My arms and shoulders, on the other hand, were rapidly turning into dead weight. Thankfully, with the really long daylight, we made it back out to the halfway point to make camp again. While having dinner that night I saw our first large land mammal: either a wolf or a bear, I'm not sure which. All I know is that it was grey, a long way off, moving fast, and quickly disappeared.
We had to get down to our pickup spot again on the fourth day. Once again we got off to a late start, once again we had clear skies, and once again the !#$% wind was in our face. This time we thought we'd be smart about it, though, so we went a little ways, then took the afternoon off with a little "siesta". As it turns out, we were actually pretty dumb...
The only real problem with our little plan was that we were assuming the winds would die down later in the day. They didn't. So, we were stuck paddling into even bigger winds, which were now making the ocean choppy as well. We made it most of the way back to the pickup spot, which was at the far end of an island in the bay. We headed out for the island as the weather got progressively worse. We were about 2/3's of the way there, but still over 1/2 mile from land. It definitely seemed too far to swim in 15 minutes, so we started getting a tad nervous when the swells started breaking over the bow of the kayak.
We fairly quickly decided to make a (strategic, of course) retreat and ride the wind back to the mainland. No sweat, we figured, we'd just paddle around the other side of the island, which should be relatively sheltered from the wind. Once again, the joke was on us, as the "island" marked on our map turned out to be more of a peninsula, with about 1/4 mile of mud between the water we were on and the water on the other side. It was now about 9:15pm.
Luck, such as it was, finally seemed to be turning in our favor, though, as high tide was at 9:40pm. We had a quick dinner while waiting for water to raise as high as possible. At 9:40pm, we started our "portage" -- essentially dragging the fully loaded kayak through the mud. We could only make it about 100yd at a time, though, as the damn boat was heavy. We soon noticed some major moose prints in the mud, which was pretty cool. Then we noticed the large, well defined, fairly recent bear prints, which was decidedly less cool! There we were, standing in the mud with our kayak with our food and food scraps, more than 200yds from water, with about 100yds to the tree line on either side. Now I truly understand where the expression "sitting duck" comes from!
With renewed enthusiasm, we started really dragging that sucker. We finally made it to the water, and hopped in as soon as we had enough to float the boat -- about 8". We were hitting the bottom with every paddle, but we didn't care. Right about the time we hit deeper water, I saw the bear. He was on the mainland side (thankfully!) and heading away from the "island".
We finally made it to the pickup spot about 10:30pm, made our last camp, and crashed. We were picked up the next morning about 9am, so we didn't have much more excitement. Except maybe when the kayak renters asked us how the Hell we trashed the bottom of their boat so badly.
When we got back to port, we flew back to Juneau, then over to Anchorage to start the land-based half of our vacation. I'll save that for another message (so let me know now if you don't care to have to read through even more of this stuff!).