Alaskan Sampler 2000 - Kenai Penninsula |
A construction detour takes us off the highway in Anchorage and we don't find gas until we reach Girdwood. This is the largest Tesoro yet. It's like a town within itself. Raining again. (Seward gets 160 inches a year.) We pull into a nice spot in the Williwaw Campground, Chugach National Forest on the Portage Glacier Road. A paved campground. Wow. We can sometimes see the mountains. They're green here and lower (mostly 4-7,000 feet high), still carrying snow even down low. Glaciers are everywhere. But we miss the classic views. Too many clouds. We don't bother looking for moose at Moose Flats. We've passed dozens of moose highway signs ("Brake for a moose") since we last saw an animal. |
Day 11 Begich-Boggs Visitor Center is built on the gravel deposits of the terminal moraine of deposited by Portage Glacier in 1893. Just outside the visitor center sits Portage Lake, over 600 feet deep and only decades old. Formed from the retreating Portage Glacier that extended to the visitor center when that was built, the depth of the lake is the chief cause of the rapid retreat of the glacier. The glacier retreats around 330 feet a year. |
The extensive mudflats seen along the Turnagain Arm at low tide are another glacial feature. Glacial silt is deposited at least a thousand feet deep in the arm. The large tide fluctuations constantly shift the silts. The mudflats are treacherous, acting like quicksand. These elderberries on the Hope highway at a Cook Inlet pull off are abundant in part because they are poisonous when raw. The seeds contain a glycocide related to cyanide. We discover Devil's Club in a Hope campground. This is a truly wicked plant with barbs on the stems, on the underside of the plate sized leaves and even on the berries. It can reach 8 feet tall, and, as if that weren't enough, the berries are considered toxic. |
The Town of Hope boasts a population of 200, but it reached over 3,000 during the gold rush. Across the Turnagain Arm from the Seward Highway and about 45 miles from Anchorage as the crow flies, it is much further removed culturally. Many houses remain unpainted, sport shutters to keep out the sun at night in the summer, and are festooned with antlers. The shopping center is an RV park, one-stop store that sells out of ice during salmon runs. On a lark, characters living in the 1889 gold rush community of tents and cabins at Resurrection Creek chose to name their town after the youngest rusher to arrive on the next boat. His name was Percy Hope. The gold is gone, but the residents are still characters. In Hope, Kevin buys a fishing licence at the Tesoro from an ancient woman who finds her license book in her liquor store behind her candy bar inventory. She leaves the time blank so he can use the same license the next day too. She says that if anyone says anything to send them to her. She's been wanting to give them an earful and would like the chance. I park on a back street beside what may have been an old house foundation - hard to tell. Ghost forest of long dead trees and truck farms replaced by fenced salt marshes are victims of saltwater flooding the area when the '64 quake dropped this ground two feet. The foundation and a fallen in house nearby appear to be other casualties. |
Kevin starts fishing at Resurrection Creek with no luck although other fishermen are doing well. Many of them have flies instead of the spoon recommended by a fellow Walmart shopper in Anchorage, and most of the fishermen have waders or at least tall leather boots. I didn't even wear my hiking boots and I feel trapped by the mud flats behind the creek. I soon go back to the camper and sketch a little and wash my hair. |
When the tide waters flow into the constricted waters of the Turnagain Arm after low tide a bore tide as much as six feet tall rushes abruptly landward. Kevin keeps an eye out and spots a bore tide while he's fishing. He gets some tips and moves up-stream. Soon he's back with four pretty pinks. I wasn't really prepared for him to catch anything. We put them in the collapsible cooler I brought, dump in my one tray of ice and start searching for more. There's none in town. And none for many miles. More construction. We find ice at 9 p.m. in Cooper Landing on the Sterling Highway. While Kevin calls home I spot our only mountain goat on the trip. We stop in a pulloff just down the road and cook salmon for dinner. It's really good. We get rid of our fish scraps and have ice cream for desert. |
Day 12 Kevin is up real early. We drive to Kenai and I nap while Kevin visits with some net fishermen. We visit a couple more Russian churches near "Old Town", drive a coastal road loop, and move on to Seward. |
We check in at Bear Creek RV near Seward then encounter the worst road of our trip on the way to Exit Glacier. We've driven on some bad roads, but I'm glad I don't have to travel this one everyday. Exit Glacier is one of 32 glaciers fed by Harding Icefield, an enormous ice cap. Exit Glacier provided explorers the easiest egress from the icefield, hence its name. This glacier once extended to Resurrection Bay but is retreating at the rate of 55 feet a year. It's raining at the glacier, but it's easily accessed. I break off a small piece and hold it to my ear listening for the crackle; I can't hear anything. Is this just a myth? After a walk around Seward we return to the campground and start packing gear for home. |
Day 13 Today we take the Kenai Fjords boat tour. We dress warmly and for the first time wish we had gloves. It's raining as we board the tour boat, the Greatland; the seats are cold. We see puffins, cormorants and a harbor seal before stopping for a grilled salmon lunch at Fox Island. Then Captian Mike follows the birds and finds three humpback whales. A mother and her yearling swim under our boat. These whales have two blow holes and can breath in and out at the same time. The ride is cold and windy out on the bow, but Kevin and I love it. The ride makes up for the awful visibility. Can't see any scenery. |
As we leave the Portage Glacier Road we stop for espresso and ice cream before continuing around the Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet. Captain Cook of Hawaii fame was considered to be the first Anchorage area explorer. Cook Inlet is named for him, and the story goes that he named this arm of the Cook Inlet "Turnagain" because here he had to turn his ships around again because he hadn't found a river. |
Returning to Anchorage necessitates driving back through the Seward Highway construction zone. We follow a pickup with a dog in the back who barks at every person on foot. He never once barked at the construction workers driving the equipment. Mangled guard rails along the way are left from last winter's avalanches. Later I have to stand on the brakes for traffic that's stopping to watch two adult moose. Those are the first moose we've seen since leaving the Denali Highway and the last we will see in the wild. |
Icebergs from the glacial calving float through the lake toward Portage River. Blue ice again. The blue shows more on overcast days. It's a wonder these aren't mail box blue. These bergs seem to be stuck on rocks or they'd have been pushed down river. They melt faster underwater than above causing them to tip over and resulting in the odd melt patterns. I enjoy the visitor center exhibits; Kevin has had enough of these. The road to Whittier (through the railroad tunnel) has just opened up to highway traffic. Pretty elaborate tunnel system. One-way traffic with some emergency turn-outs. The ranger at the visitor center seems a little relieved that we aren't interested in driving through. I heard on NPR that there's nothing to see once you get there. The Prince William Sound tours probably don't agree with that. |
A Southeaster is coming in and the winds pick up. When the newer, larger boats with stabilizers head back in Captain Mike cuts our tour short and turns back too. Back in Resurrection Bay with the wind off our stern, the ride smooths out. We go inside where lots of folks have been suffering with seasickness. With smoother water under our keel we take a detour to see a kazillion nesting kittiwakes and eight Steller sea lions before returning to Seward. |
Photo by Kevin McBryde |
© Regina M. McMullan, 2000 |
