Sitka, Alaska

Sitka Waterfront

Sitka National Historical Park

On our last day in Alaska, we visited the Alaska Raptor center, the Sitka National Historical Park, and for a short time, the town itself. At the end, we had around 15 minutes inside the Russian Orthodox cathedral of Sitka. The historical park had made us aware of the history of the Russians during the 100 years or so before they sold Alaska to the US in 1867, which was lucky since there was no time to learn much about the cathedral, other than that this building replaced one that burned, along with much of the downtown, around 50 years ago. And that the icons, including one with a miraculous history, were mainly saved from the fire.

Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Downtown Sitka

Other than a very short walk in Juneau the first night of our trip this was the only time we experienced the tourist shops and many souvenir opportunities that are standard on most cruises. Some of the merchandise was appealing, including some of the carving in whale bone. We only bought a reproduction of a painting by one of the naturalists from the boat, who sells in a gallery in Sitka. She was there and signed it for us.

The only thing I ever read about Sitka before the trip was The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. It's not about real Sitka, but about a counterfactual Sitka that was settled in the 1950s by Jews whose alternate reality had caused them to be barred from creating the state of Israel. A wonderful book -- but not really relevant.

John Muir's last trip to Alaska was in 1890. While his travels around a decade earlier had been in very rough conditions, by this time there were many tourists in purpose-built cruise ships of that era, and he traveled at least part of the time in much more comfortable conditions. Here is one day's journal entry from 1890 that I found especially charming:

July 7. Another fine day; scarce a cloud in the sky. The icebergs in the bay are miraged in the distance to look like the frontal wall of a great glacier. I am writing letters in anticipation of the next steamer, the Queen. 

She arrived about 2.30 P.M. with two hundred and thirty tourists. What a show they made with their ribbons and kodaks! All seemed happy and enthusiastic, though it was curious to see how promptly all of them ceased gazing when the dinner-bell rang, and how many turned from the great thundering crystal world of ice to look curiously at the Indians that came alongside to sell trinkets, and how our little camp and kitchen arrangements excited so many to loiter and waste their precious time prying into our poor hut.

Alaska Raptor Center: this bald eagle can't fly, but he's calm when faced with a crowd of tourists.
All today's photos are by Len.

Kayaking Here and There

Kayaking in Alaska: we were just behind the kayak in the photo.
An Alsaka brown bear (aka grizzly bear) is just visible at the left of the waterfall.
We didn't want to be the kayak closest to the bear.

On the Huron River this morning

We enjoyed kayaking so much in Alaska that we decided to try the Argo Cascades, an artificial rapids on the Huron River a few miles away from our house. After the cascades, which take around 10 minutes, it's smooth water down to Gallup Pond where one turns in the kayak and rides back to one's car in a van. Not like the inflatable zodiac-type boats that one rides from the ship to the shore off the National Geographic Sea Bird.

The kayaks are very different. Here they are just open, coated-styrofoam hulls that take on huge amounts of water but ride so high that it immediately drains out of holes in the bottom of the boat. The kayaks there are closed (though without a skirt), as the air temperature can be very cold and the water is always cold. Wet landings there require knee boots. Wet landings here require bare feet, keens, or tevas. No bears here either. Guaranteed.

Alaska Twilight

Sunset and twilight in the Alaskan summer take a long time, as the sun slowly makes its way around the horizon. Even at mid-day we noticed that the sun was quite low in the sky, and the moon, too rolls around not far from the horizon, thanks to the tilt of the planet.

After dinner on our first night on the ship we had some shore time in Juneau; as we walked away from the ship it was bathed in golden light.

National Geographic Sea Bird in Juneau harbor

On our second evening on the ship, the red and gold colors of the sky at nightfall lasted around an hour; during this time, several whales were coming up repeatedly near the ship. Every passenger with a camera took several photos of whales illuminated in the powerful colors of the sunset.

Whale in the sunset (Len's photos)

Another sunset was brief but dramatic:

One-burst sunset!

And our last night, though there was no sun visible, we enjoyed a long blue-grey evening with eerie fog banks lifting and dropping in front of the high banks of the Peril Strait.

Twilight in Peril Strait

From John Muir: 

"The most extravagantly colored of all the sunsets I have yet seen in Alaska was one I enjoyed on the voyage from Portland to Wrangell, when we were in the midst of one of the most thickly islanded parts of the Alexander Archipelago. The day had been showery, but late in the afternoon the clouds melted away from the west, all save a few that settled down in narrow level bars near the horizon. The evening was calm and the sunset colors came on gradually, increasing in extent and richness of tone by slow degrees as if requiring more time than usual to ripen. At a height of about thirty degrees there was a heavy cloud-bank, deeply reddened on its lower edge and the projecting parts of its face. Below this were three horizontal belts of purple edged with gold, while a vividly defined, spreading fan of flame streamed upward across the purple bars and faded in a feather edge of dull red. But beautiful and impressive as was this painting on the sky, the most novel and exciting effect was in the body of the atmosphere itself, which, laden with moisture, became one mass of color--a fine translucent purple haze in which the islands with softened outlines seemed to float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a fitting border. The peaks, too, in the distance, and the snow-fields and glaciers and fleecy rolls of mist that lay in the hollows, were flushed with a deep, rosy alpenglow of ineffable loveliness. Everything near and far, even the ship, was comprehended in the glorious picture and the general color effect. The mission divines we had aboard seemed then to be truly divine as they gazed transfigured in the celestial glory. So also seemed our bluff, storm-fighting old captain, and his tarry sailors and all." (p. 17-18)

Glaciers

Endicott Arm approaching Dawes Glacier

In 1879, naturalist John Muir visited southeast Alaska, the first of three visits that he documented in his book Travels in Alaska (published posthumously in 1915). During our trip to the same region last week, I slowly read this work, savoring the lush and romantic quality of his descriptions of many things that remain unchanged in the last 120 years or so.

For example, here is a portion of one of his descriptions of a glacier:

Sea Bird's inflatable boat approaching Dawes Glacier

"Arriving opposite the mouth of its fiord, we steered straight inland between beautiful wooded shores, and the grand glacier came in sight in its granite valley, glowing in the early sunshine and extending a noble invitation to come and see. After we passed between the two mountain rocks that guard the gate of the fiord, the view that was unfolded fixed every eye in wondering admiration. No words can convey anything like an adequate conception of its sublime grandeur--the noble simplicity and fineness of the sculpture of the walls; their magnificent proportions; their cascades, gardens, and forest adornments; the placid fiord between them; the great white and blue ice wall, and the snow-laden mountains beyond. Still more impotent are words in telling the peculiar awe one experiences in entering these mansions of the icy North, notwithstanding it is only the natural effect of appreciable manifestations of the presence of God.

Dawes Glacier from a distance

"Standing in the gateway of this glorious temple, and regarding it only as a picture, its outlines may be easily traced, the water foreground of a pale-green color, a smooth mirror sheet sweeping back five or six miles like one of the lower reaches of a great river, bounded at the head by a beveled barrier wall of blueish-white ice four or five hundred feet high. A few snowy mountain-tops appear beyond it, and on either hand rise a series of majestic, pale-gray granite rocks from three to four thousand feet high, some of them thinly forested and striped with bushes and flowery grass on narrow shelves, especially about half way up, others severely sheer and bare and built together into walls like those of Yosemite, extending far beyond the ice barrier, one immense brow appearing beyond another with their bases buried in the glacier.

Margerie Glacier in Glacier Bay

This is a Yosemite Valley in process of formation, the modeling and sculpture of the walls nearly completed and well planted, but no groves as yet or gardens or meadows on the raw and unfinished bottom. It is as if the explorer, in entering the Merced Yosemite, should find the walls nearly in their present condition, trees and flowers in the warm nooks and along the sunny portions of the moraine-covered brows, but the bottom of the valley still covered with water and beds of gravel and mud, and the grand glacier that formed it slowly receding but still filling the upper half of the valley." (p. 26-27)

Dawes Glacier calving (Len's photo)

Last Evening in Alaska

From the Sea Bird at dusk, in the Peril Straits: a scene that reminds us of science fiction or fantasy illustrations.
Would we go through the fog bank and find ourselves in another dimension? Well, not this time.

Last night we ended our Alaska cruise with a passage through the Peril Straits towards Sitka. This morning, our Alaska stay wrapped up with an interesting bus tour of Sitka before we boarded our Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle. We are now in Seattle airport waiting for our continuing flight back home. I plan several more posts on both this blog and on my food blog to document what I saw and some of the Alaska history and cultural background that I learned during the week.

Bear we saw from our kayak

Tomorrow is the end of our trip. We'll be back in real internet contact some time monday...

Alaska

Blue icebergs floating down the fjord from a looming glacier... kayaks in a salmon stream with soaring eagles above it ... spruce and hemlock forests covered in moss... fresh fish for dinner every night... humpback whales lunging up next to the ship to take mouthfuls of krill ... a brown bear eating grass beside the water... lectures and guided hikes by expert naturalists ... reports of undersea life by a diver who goes down with a video camera ...

Alaska! We have seen snow-covered mountains and stands of trees bathed in golden afternoon sunshine. The seas one night were lit up by a vivid red sunset while whales were feeding. We walked through the little fishing town of Petersburg beneath grey clouds.  And this morning, our route towards the Icy Strait hides in deep white fog.

So far we find Alaska to be a fascinating place. I've found no time at all to share or document what we are seeing, but finally, we have purchased an internet card and to post this summary. Once I get home I'll have plenty of time to think about what we've been doing and learning, to select from our photos (already over 1000 in number), and to write about the experience.

Dawes Glacier

Humpback whale

Bald eagle