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 A view of the Alaskan landscape in the Tracy Arm fjord. |
Alaska welcomes us...
on its own special terms
of TheColumnists.com
A few blocks from downtown Anchorage, Alaska, Ivan takes
his reindeer Star for a walk between 6:00 and 7:00 every morning.
When he returns Star to her pen alongside his house on a busy
street corner, she will spend the rest of her day watching the
cars zoom by. Ivan was given this house for free on condition
that he keep the owner’s pet reindeer.
Star isn’t the only big game to walk the streets of Anchorage.
A city map carries this warning: “Give a moose at least
50 feet. If its ears lay back or its hackles rise, back off pronto…Remember,
as a moose wanders about Anchorage, dogs bark at it, cars honk
at it, and people harass it. Don’t add to its problems.”
In the capital city of Juneau, bears prowling the downtown streets
became such a nightly nuisance that merchants installed bear-proof
garbage bins.
This casual blend of wildlife with humanity is exactly what I
anticipated as a cheechako, a newcomer to Alaska. I arrived
from the Outside with a mental punch list of animals I expected
to spot: moose, bear, Dall sheep, wolves, caribou, mountain goats
and from the sea--whales, orcas and puffins. I would see them
all during the first two weeks of August while exploring the
areas around Juneau and Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula with
my husband Bill and our friends Susan and Al.
But the big game spotted us and ran for cover.
“Go there,” the ranger would point on a map, “you’re
sure to see bears.” We’d drive a gravel road to get
there and then have someone tell us, “you should have been
here last week.” Same story as we squinted hard to find
Dall sheep on a mountainside. When a moose finally browsed past
us on a hiking trail, I missed her calf because I was adjusting
my camera. Eagle Beach yielded only one eagle.
We planned our own trip because we wanted to get to know Alaska
and its wildlife more intimately than a cruise would allow. Our
personal guide was “The Milepost.” We lived off the
land by means of bed and breakfasts, the hospitality of Bill’s
cousin on the Kenai, and all the luggage we could stuff into
our rented car.
Our first adventure was a 10-hour boat trip out of Juneau through
Tracy Arm, a fjord that ends at the foot of a tidewater glacier.
The ads promised bears, moose, eagles, orcas. For the first couple
of hours we saw fog. As we sailed past Admiralty Island we peered
hopefully at its shores. The Tlingit natives called it “Kootznoowoo,”
Fortress of the Bears.
Not one bear was in sight.
As we entered the mouth of Tracy Arm, Alaska presented itself
on its own terms, not ours. It chose to awe us first with its
physical magnificence, then its culture, finally with bounty
of water life.
The fog lifted to reveal a sapphire sky, blue waters thick with
glacial dust, and icebergs that looked like sculptures. The captain
of our small boat of 36 passengers cut the motor so we could
drift among the ice floes at the foot of the glacier. In silence
we listened to chunks of ice go thunk against the bow and crack
in the warm sun. Some flipped over to reveal clear, jewel-like
frozen bubbles on the underside. Caves in the larger icebergs
glowed translucent blue.
I could have stayed forever in this enchanted world.
But Sitka was waiting for us with its treasure box of culture.
The next day Bill and I flew over the countless islands of the
Alexander Archipelago to Baranof Island where Sitka was established
as the capital of Russian America in the early 19th century.
The Russians fought an epic battle with the Tlingits there. Sitka
reflects the beauties of both cultures with a Russian Orthodox
church in the middle of the main street and a park at the edge
of the water where totem poles peek out from the spruce forest.
Back on the mainland we delighted in finding tiny Russian Orthodox
churches filled with splendid icons. Often a priest was on hand
to explain the meaning of church art and practices.
 |
 At left, a sign warning of moose traffic. At right, Joyce and Susan with a puffin doll. |
Alaska revealed its vastness when we flew the “milk run” from Juneau to Anchorage. With touch downs in Yakutat and Cordova, we never got beyond a sense of touch with the waves of jagged, ice-streaked mountains, the numberless glaciers sprawled between their peaks, and the fjords and braided rivers that cut through them.
In Cordova a marine scientist took the seat next to us. He and a small crew of researchers from the University of Michigan had just gotten off the Bering Glacier. Next time they return they want to bring a robot to probe underneath. He answered my question: Global warming has been going on since the end of the mini-ice age about 400 years ago, well before the industrial age. Its causes are complex. But I’m amazed later on to learn how much the glaciers we visit have receded within my lifetime and how much that melt is accelerating.
As we landed in Anchorage, the urban sprawl came as a shock.
But Anchorage presented one of the wonders of the north: sunset. On our first night in town we walked to the edge of the Cook Inlet mudflats to watch the sun go down. When we first looked, the sun hung above a notch in the mountains on the horizon. But instead of sinking into the notch, the sun moved sideways. Would it disappear for the night before reaching the side of the mountain or would it get there and then move off the edge for another show and then sink into the water? We laid bets. The sun made its final descent at 10:15 just before reaching the outer edge of the mountain. Twilight lingered for another two hours.
No wonder, I thought, the name of the state comes from the Aleut word “Aleyeska”--the great land.
Then we found the salmon.
On the Kenai Peninsula we stopped at stream after stream to watch the jumping, spawning salmon that choked the water. Dead ones littered the banks. I can still smell their musky stink. Rivers in the Kenai were battle grounds of “combat fishing,” as the locals refer to anglers standing shoulder to shoulder along the banks. Bill’s cousin’s son David spent July fishing commercially with four other men on the Kenai River. They netted 120,000 pounds of salmon. David estimates that a total of five million salmon passed through the river that month. The night we arrived at his family’s home, Al went out with him and caught a salmon. He sent it home.
We had a few days to go in our trip when Alaska revealed its marine life in all its glory. It started with puffins.
We took a six-hour boat trip out of Seward through Resurrection Bay, around Aialik Cape in the Gulf of Alaska, and out to the glacier at the end of Aialik Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park. As we entered the gulf, we sailed up to a rocky island and there they were--not on logos, on brochures, or in the form of stuffed toys–but in the flesh (or feather) right in front of Susan and me. These were the birds we came to see in Alaska! Using their wings, they sped through the water like motor boats. These fat little birds are the clowns of the sea, with red webbed feet, alert white faces and thick orange and yellow beaks. They flutter their wings madly in order to fly, but they can dive to depths of 400 feet. Susan and I couldn’t believe our good fortune: tens of thousands of both horned and tufted puffins lived on the island and cliffs all around us.
But life got bigger than puffins. A humpback whale surfaced and dove in a wide arc around the boat. A mother orca and her calf frolicked closer and closer and finally swam beneath us as clearly as if they were in a fish bowl. Harbor seals bobbed on the ice floes when the water swelled from the falling chunks of the nearby glacier. Russet brown Stellar sea lions hauled out on the rocks to catch the rays of the evening sun.
I understand the call of the wild now. How someone could write “dear John” letters to everyone she knows and come north for reincarnation in a land where every view is worthy of a national park. But I hear the suicide rate is high. Winter can get to you. When we stayed in the pleasant town of Valdez we learned that in December it gets only six hours of daylight. In one season Juneau gets over 100 inches of rain. Further north and inland the cold and the storms are beyond comprehension to this native Californian.
Alaska, like its people, is one of a kind, impossible to stereotype. It defies expectation. The day we arrived, I went to the Juneau public library to send an e-mail note to my family and to Ron, the editor of this website. I looked out the huge window and saw the mountains on one side and a giant Holland America cruise ship on the other. The librarian was an older woman with gray-blonde hair pulled back in a French roll. Since the weather was warm, she wore a tank top. A rose tattoo covered one shoulder.
©2004 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos are courtesy of the author.
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