I think it's probably safe to say it's been a while since I posted anything for you to read. Not that I haven't been up to anything, I just haven't been very organised. I blame middle age!
I couldn't let this one go by, though. I have wanted to go to Alaska for a very long time, so when Daniel was sent up there to work for a week we thought we'd add a few days holiday onto the end of it.
We stayed in Anchorage, the capital of Alaska. Anchorage has a grimy, run-down look about it, which probably isn't helped by the fact that a lot of the buildings in the downtown area where we stayed were built in the 1960s and '70s after an earthquake. Not the most elegant of cities, I think it's safe to say, but that wasn't why we were there, so it didn't really matter.
On our first day we went on a tour of some glaciers, which is simply the thing to do as a tourist in Alaska, apparently. If you look at a map, to the south and a bit east of Anchorage is Whittier. We drove along the Cook (as in Captain Cook) Inlet to get there.
Every morning we were there was misty and overcast. It wasn't nearly as cold as I expected it to be; I barely needed a light jacket.
The overcast weather made the landscape very monochromatic - mostly grays and blues. In places it was as if land, sea and sky were all one, making it quite surreal and almost hallucinatory - which is the best word I could find to describe it.
That is a mountain on the left on the above photo, by the way. It was very hard to capture the scale of the inlet. Just imagine huge, and quadruple that.
As the sun rose and the clouds lifted, the land began to define itself:
We stopped off at a boat ramp, just because it was so lovely. As you can see, they have big tides there:
To get to Whittier, which is a deep sea harbor built during World War II, we drove through the longest railway and road tunnel in North America. After we'd paid the entrance fee, of course! It's called the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel.
It's a very odd tunnel: it's 4,100 metres long and only one lane wide with a train track running down the middle of it. As a result, it's only open at certain times for traffic heading in any given direction. You line up and wait for the next tunnel opening, and then off you go.
Whittier has a population of 218, so it's not exactly a heaving metropolis. There was a cruise ship anchored there, though. Those things are enormous. I can't imagine spending even a few days at sea with all those people. Ocean cruises are very popular in Alaska, partly because the coastline is so complicated and interesting, and partly because a large part of the state simply doesn't have roads.
Our tour boat - a catamaran - wasn't nearly as big as a cruise ship, but it was still big enough to hold about 300 people. And it could move! In five hours we were given the opportunity to see 26 glaciers, and we covered 145 miles (about 233 kilometres).
I'm not sure that I have these in exactly the right order, but nevertheless, please join me for the tour....
Our first look at wildlife was a group (pack? mob?) of Steller sea lions. They were hard to see as they're about the same colour as the rocks they were lounging on. The males can grow up to 3.25 metres long, and weigh about 544 kilos. That's a lot of mammal!
It seemed that everywhere we looked, the landscape was stunning, and awesome in the overwhelming sense of the word:
And sure enough, those glaciers popped up on a regular basis:
This is the first glacier we got close to. I can't remember its name, but I don't think it really needs one. See that little point down on the left hand side about a quarter of the way up?
This is what is looked like when we got closer. That ice in the foreground is, I would guess, about 25 metres tall. Hard to fathom, isn't it?
We had a very knowledgeable and interesting tour guide from the national park service explain to us that the ice is blue because when it gets compressed over the thousands and thousands of years it takes to form a glacier and all the air is squeezed out it absorbs all the colours of the light spectrum except blue.
It was amazing to be able to see the layers in the ice, and think about how incredibly long it took for it to make its way to the water. I never did really wrap my mind around it. I got to the point where my brain had to convince itself that everything was perfectly normal so it wouldn't explode.
As it happened, the glaciers were saving the best for last. I believe we were at the Harriman Glacier, which was the second glacier we managed to get reasonably close to:
We were looking at the harbor seals on the ice floes (all those brown dots you can see in the photo below), which was wonderful enough:
But then a lump of ice fell from the glacier. I don't know why, but it's called "calving". It was quite spectacular, and there were lots of "oohs" and "aahs":
Over the next several minutes, pieces of ice kept dropping off the glacier, until with one crack an absolutely ENORMOUS sheet came tumbling down. The pilot later estimated it to be about 46 metres tall and 137 metres wide. Daniel caught it all with the camera. I hope these photos give you some sort of an idea of how far beyond words it was:
The swell it generated was somewhere in the vicinity of three metres. The pilot got very excited about it as he turned us into the wave so we weren't swamped. He said the tour company is lucky if they see something like this twice in a season.
Phew!
Truly an amazing experience, even if we had to share it with a heap of other people.
We had an uneventful journey back to harbour after that. We even got freshly made chocolate chip cookies!
And perused some icebergs:
We also got to hang out with the sea otters for a little bit. We saw several groups of them throughout the tour. The pilot would cut the engine and we'd drift quietly for a while until they got sick of us.
Three things about sea otters I was very interested to learn: they rarely spend time on land; they eat something like a third of their body weight in food every day (good thing the northern seas are so bountiful); and a group of them is called a raft. I believe this is a fairly small raft:
Not a bad way to spend a day!
We also visited the Anchorage museum, which was a short walk from our hotel. While the historical exhibits were very interesting, the highlight for me was the Alaska Native Cultures exhibit, which is on loan from the Smithsonian Institution - America's archive of all sorts of amazing things related to the history and culture of the country.
To say these people were (and are) incredibly skilled is a huge understatement. Even the most simple thing, like a spindle, was beautifully made and embellished. Yet again, I find myself lost for words in trying to explain it. I wish I could have taken photos to show you all. If you do a web image search for Alaskan native art, you will get an idea of what I mean. There is something very simple and graphic about their work that I just love.
They made extremely good use of those long, long nights in winter.
Speaking of night, I'm afraid we didn't get to see the northern lights. The one night they were potentially viewable, it rained! Not to worry - there's the first in a long list of reasons to go back.
If you look at your map, almost directly south of Anchorage is a town called Seward, which is on Resurrection Bay. They pronounce it "soo-ard", by the way.
Here it is from across the bay:
We had a yummy lunch there, but didn't spend too much time looking around as we had another glacier to visit! This time it was one we could walk to.
The Kenai ("kee-nye") Fjords National Park includes the Exit Glacier. We hiked a few k's to the overlook:
And it wasn't too bad of a hike at all. Here I am at the top and I'm not even half dead! I don't think we were all that far above sea level.
While we couldn't get close enough to touch it or anything, I was still very impressed by the fact that we had walked to a glacier. This is not something a person generally gets to do in their day-to-day life.
On the way back down, we stopped at what is called the outflow field, where the melting ice forms a river:
It was interesting to see how muddy the rivers
are after being spoiled by Idaho's crystal clear waters. The rivers in
this part of Alaska, at least, carry a lot of grit down from the
glaciers. I'm not too sure how a fish could survive in there, and
Daniel was disappointed that he didn't get to find out for himself if
they could or not... reason number two to go back.
On our way back to Anchorage, we got stopped by the scenery again:
As for souvenirs, apart from the photos (there are about three million more of them), Daniel bought me a skein of musk ox wool for my birthday from the Oomingmak Co-op in Anchorage.
The co-op is made up of native people from all over Alaska who hand knit a variety of items to help supplement their incomes. The knitting is incredibly fine, and I was very pleased to see that their items are priced appropriately for the work (so many people seem to think a hand-made thing should cost the same as a machine-made one). Unfortunately, that put their work out of our price range. Even the skein made me think twice.
I'm looking forward to knitting it into a beanie (the skein came with three patterns) even though I feel nervous about handling such a rare and beautiful yarn. Honestly, it's the softest yarn I've ever felt.
Here's a link to their website, if you're interested in learning more.
And that was more or less it. Three days in Alaska very well spent, I think. I'd very much like to go back and spend some time hiking and camping. I'd also like to learn more about the indigenous people and their arts and crafts.
Like remote WA, it isn't country you just wander off into without knowing what you're doing. I like that; it makes me think there are still some wild places left.
