Another summer in Alaska, come and gone. A lot has happened since my last post, so I will try to summarize. Firstly, I didn't take a whole lot of pictures because I'm using my backup camera body since the regular one broke in the spring, but working with Uncruise was a great experience this summer, and I had lots of chances to see bears from nice and close. This small bear family was from a skiff tour near Lake Eva, and they both were very curious about the skiff. The cub was also great at standing on her hind legs.
I think the cub was born over the winter, and the mama was a pretty new mama, maybe this was her first cub. She would be about 4 or 5 years old then.
Here's the cub getting a better look.
Near the end of the summer I had a break and I went on a trip into Glacier Bay for most of the time. My friend Danny was with me and we paddled an aluminum canoe all over the bay. Well, mostly. So when we arrived at Bartlett Cove (the park headquarters and the place you start) we tried to get a ride up bay (to the good stuff) with the day boat, but they were full for the next day and it also cost a bunch of money, so we were a bit stumped... But then we saw a pretty little boat at the dock and the people had come up to the main office to check in. So we struck a conversation with them and they offered to take us up into the bay further (about 30 miles) and that saved us a few days of paddling!
Here's a shot of them standing on the deck of their boat watching us paddle away into the night. That first night we camped on the end of where the bay splits into two arms. We opted for the east arm, which used to be filled with the Muir Glacier. its now filled with water and Phalaropes, like this one:
The next day it was rainy and windy, and since we were dubious about the safety of the canoe in waves, we opted to stay put and walk around a bit. It is a beautiful place, and the forest is filled with big trees and lots of space between them, with really thick moss on the ground.
So the next day we loaded everything in and got moving. It was actually pretty easy to go 12 miles that day, despite my fears of being slow. The canoe was slow but not that slow, and with a bit of current everything went pretty well. We managed to see a moose when we stopped for lunch. That night we camped near a river outflow and in a field of strawberries, which we ate happily.
The next day we headed up and into glacier country. Glacier bay is all about the glaciers, right? So we needed to see some ice. This picture shows us paddling along with The Nunatak behind us. We had camped in Nunatak cove, right next to this big rock. I'm not exactly sure, but I believe the rock was named by John Muir when it stuck out of the Muir Glacier, and since a Nunatak is an island in the ice, this could have been the first one ever named, and all others have been named after this one. Hence the capital The.
We got to McBride Inlet and put our stuff down and then paddled into the icy waters to get a look at the glacier. I had gone to McBride last year aboard Layla, so I was excited to see the differences, and they were great. The face had retreated 200-400 ft in a year. I'm not sure if this is about the "normal" for this glacier, because previously I had only seen the face in 2015, and it was a lot further out then, possibly a mile. So 400 ft/year over six years is half a mile, meaning its slowing down, or that my estimate for retreat is not accurate. Its hard to judge distance, so it could have retreated 800 ft in the last year.
Its changing a lot, in any case. Here's a picture from the shoreline that wasn't exposed last year, and we have a ways to go to the face.
The picture above is facing away from the glacier, by the way. Also, the big canyons on the far side of the water in that picture show where the glacier was in 2015.
We climbed up a ways to get a better view, and in this picture, if you look closely, you can see a river valley coming down on the right hand side. The glacier was halfway across that river valley last year.
And the beach we landed on to climb from was basically right under where we took this picture.
Here's another view.
And a shot of the two of us.
We paddled over to that river on the far side, and standing where the face of the glacier was a year ago, this is what the view looks like:
So then we headed back to camp and the next day we went further up to the Riggs Glacier. I had last been here in 2015 as well, but never gone up the side where we hiked this day. So it was neat getting a new experience. There is a big nunatak in the middle of the glacier moraine and we opted to try and climb up it.
So we paddled up the outflow river a ways, then towed the canoe up as far as we could with our bow and stern lines, and then pulled it up on the beach.
The face of Riggs has a bit of a lake on the end of it, but it is not a tidewater glacier. We climbed up a long ways to look, and in the future there will be a small lake here.
Glacier country is great, but not having a motor, and being nervous about the safety of the canoe in big seas made us start to paddle back early. We had fine weather and made pretty good time back down the east arm, and one of our campsites had a nice lagoon near it, with a beautiful sunset:
You're allowed to make fires in the park, so we did that a few times, and it was nice to cook on and to keep some bugs away.
I think the reason I got started loving alaska is from going fishing with my dad when I was young in the north end of Vancouver Island. The thing that I remember seeing, and loving so much, was this kind of grass that has nice big seeds on top, and blows in the wind on the beaches up there. When I first started going to Alaska, I discovered this grass exists up there too, and something about the grass makes me feel like I'm in the wilderness. So here it is again, but framed by sunset and the most wild place I've ever been to.
After this day we had a great time paddling into Adams inlet and back out again, and then on down through the main part of the bay and into the Beardslee Islands, where we made our way back to Bartlett Cove again. It was a fun time, but I didn't take many pictures, except this one where we were sailing across the main part of the bay. We found a nice mast (tree) and rigged it up to stand straight, then used the rain fly from my tent as a sail. It worked really well, and we were able to sail pretty fast.
I've left the canoe in Bartlett Cove, ready for another adventure, and then I went back to work. Uncruise brought me back to Seattle and then I put that boat away and headed up to Bellingham for a trip in Gran Milonga for a week. We had been planning to go into Canada, but ended up deciding to go to Olympia, where we explored some places I'd never been before. That trip is now done, and I'm a few days away from flying down to Mexico to get back aboard my Pogo 40 Aquila and get her ready for the winter season down there. I've got a bunch of projects to work on, including repairing the mainsail in a lot of places and putting new speakers in and replacing the solar system, and hauling out to do bottom paint, but hopefully that will go easily and quickly, and I'll be getting some surf in too!
