Uncategorized | Alaska Trip 2014

July 11: Today’s drive to Seward was only about 105 miles and for the most part, it retraced a portion of our previous drive from Homer to Kenai. A short walk from our campground is the Alaska Sea Life Center, housing a number of local species of sea creatures as well as sheltering injured ones until they can be rehabilitated and released. It was a very interesting display! You don’t realize just how big a 1,700-lb. sea lion is until one swims by you very slowly … and gracefully. They’re huge!! It was also fascinating to watch an octopus maneuver around its enclosure—a truly weird but amazing creature!

July 12: Our day began at a fairly lazy pace, but we were at Exit Glacier Headquarters by around 2:00 p.m. There, a U.S. Nat’l. Park Service Guide met our Motorcade group and narrated our walk up to Exit Glacier and back (about 1½ miles). Along the way, markers indicated points to which the glacier had extended at various times, starting from about 1815. In a nutshell, the glacier has receded a lot already and is still receding. No surprise there …. Dave and I visited the Exit Glacier 25 years ago. It was only a short walk from the parking lot to the glacier in 1989. Now it is about a 3/4 mile walk through new forest and over barren rocks.

Dave and I ended our day with a buffalo burger and fries at the local Red’s Burgers, a burger stand housed in an old school bus. Their indoor seating is available in a second old school bus. Can’t say much for the ambience, but the food was great!

Ranger Tom held several classes along our guided hike to the Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Here we look out over river beds and forests that were covered by the glacier 200 years ago.

Dave and Marilyn pose in front of the Exit Glacier near Seward, AK. This glacier has receded over a half mile since we visited it in 1989.

July 13: This morning, our Motorcade group met at an outdoor (covered) pavilion very near where we’re parked. We were served a breakfast of omelets-in-a-bag, biscuits, bear paws (sweet rolls), and coffee. In case you’ve never had an omelet-in-a-bag, just put a raw egg (or 2 or 3, all without shells!) into a Ziploc, add whatever ingredients you want to go with it, smoosh everything together, express all the air from the bag and seal it. Then submerge the bag in boiling water for ~13 minutes, let stand a minute or so, and voilà! Omelet in a bag! Pretty tasty, too. 🙂

After breakfast we had a short drivers’ meeting to review upcoming activities, followed by a brief devotional service. Then it was a nap and lunch for Dave and me both. Tomorrow Dave and I will be away on a 7-hour tour of the Kenai Fjords, and no one from our group will be available to dog-sit because most are going on this same tour. So Dave looked up a local dog-sitting business, and this afternoon we met with Heidi, the young lady who runs it. Dave and I were well impressed with her and Beighley liked her as well, so we were glad to have found someone to walk Beighley while we’re gone.

We finished the afternoon with a little shopping in the quaint downtown section of Seward (quilt shop and yarn shop). We also bought a few groceries and picked up a pizza for dinner on the way back to the coach. Soon it will be time to rest up for a busy day tomorrow.

July 14: After a leisurely start to the day, our group assembled at the appropriate pier and boarded a tour boat for a trip to Kenai Fjiords. It was a lovely, sunny day for a change, and the trip outbound was fairly quiet—that is, until someone spotted a whale spout! During the rest of the trip, our boat turned out to be quite a “whale magnet.” We saw humpbacks and caught a glimpse of what our guide decided was “transient” orcas that prey on other whales in the area. One humpback surfaced very near our boat, swam under us, then went on its way. There were porpoises playing alongside our boat along the way as well. We had lunch (featuring prime rib and grilled salmon) near Aialik Glacier at the “back” of Aialik Bay, and while we were eating, the glacier calved a huge chunk of ice. The resulting wave pattern from it tossed us around a bit, but then settled back to normal. As you might imagine, there were lots of smaller chunks of ice floating around us as well.

After lunch, on our way back to the Seward dock, we saw salmon running in Resurrection Bay, as well as stellar sea lions sunning themselves on some rock outcroppings. A couple of the males tussled for top spot on the rock as we were passing by and provided us a show. All the while, there were myriads of sea birds flying about, including puffins, kittiwakes, and the ever-present seagulls.

We arrived back at the coach weary from a full day’s activity. Beighley was glad to see us and had been attended to quite well in our absence. We were glad to hear that others in our group who had hired Heidi to look in on their dogs were pleased as well. We soon had dinner and went to bed promptly, to be ready for the upcoming drive back to Anchorage tomorrow.

BIG_4691 — Our tour boat leaves Seward on a beautiful sunny day. The scenery is breathtaking.

BIG_4698 — This is one of the glaciers in the area that still extends to the sea.

BIG_4700 — This is the “humpback” of a humpback whale as it went back under water after surfacing for a breath of fresh air.

BIG_4709 — The clouds, snow, ice, mountains, and sea are beautiful sights to behold on a sunny day.

BIG_4717 — The sea lions are taking in the sun on a rock at the end of a peninsula. The big males weigh up to 2500 pounds. There is a considerable amount of contention over position and status.

BIG_4720 — The sea lions appear to struggle to move on the rock, but exhibit amazing speed with their graceful moves in the water.

BIG_4737 — “Thar she blows!” There were four humpback whales feeding together in this area. Look carefully and you can spot evidence of three of them in this picture.

BIG_4740 — A humpback surfaces with mouth open to capture the tiny critters on which it feeds. The gulls signal when a whale will surface. They dive for the surface just as a whale comes up on a feeding breach. They go for the spoils from the whale’s lunge.

BIG_4743 — Boats gather to enjoy the sights in the area where the whales are actively feeding.

BIG_4751 — Wow! What a change from the sights of the gulf coast.

July 7: We drove from Homer to Kenai, parked at Beluga Lookout RV Park, and had a group dinner at Paradisos Restaurant nearby. We enjoyed a great meal, including prime rib (they even cooked mine!), salad, veggies, and yummy sorbet “sundae” for dessert.

A path near our campground in Kenai overlooks the mouth of the Kenai River where it empties its contents into the Cook Inlet.

From the bluff near our campground, one can see than mountains across the Cook Inlet. The sun was still high late in the summer day.

July 8: Because we are participating in only one “tour” activity at this stop, we had a quiet day of catching up on laundry, housekeeping, napping, etc. Many of the other people in our group packed in three days of flights and boat trips to the other side of the Cook Inlet. They went to fish for salmon and “capture” bears with their cameras.

“Fishing” for salmon consists of casting a bare hook into the water and snagging a salmon in the mouth. The salmon don’t feed in fresh water, so there is no bait on the hook. Salmon snagged somewhere other than the mouth are supposed to be returned to the water. In the area our people were fishing, the limit was usually three salmon. Most people caught their limit within the half hour allotted to each boat at the mouth of a stream.

July 9: Most of our traveling companions were fishing today, so Dave and I had another quiet day to ourselves. In addition to running a couple of errands, we drove out to the end of the Kenai Spur Highway. When he was working here for a month in 1989, this was the route his group used for access to the area in which they were doing seismic exploration. We recognized a few landmarks, but not many. The area has really built up, as you might expect, but it was fun to see it again. Along the drive, we also saw a moose cow watching us from the woods along the highway.

Back in Kenai, very near our campground, there is a little Russian Orthodox Church built in 1841 that we had seen when we were here in 1989. We had hoped to see inside it again and maybe go inside this time. Unfortunately, the building was locked and there are curtains over the windows, but the building is still there. Over the last few years, mold growth had seriously compromised the wooden walls. Fortunately, a preservation group has eradicated the mold and is now reinforcing the walls. The little church is well kept and still used for weekend worship services.

The historic Holy Assumption Orthodox Church was within a couple of blocks of our campsite.

The Holy Assumption Orthodox Church has been an important center of interest in Kenai since 1841.

July 10: Due to rain and low cloud cover, our trip to the Chinitna area today for bear viewing was cancelled, so we substituted for that a flight to Redoubt Bay Lodge on a 10-passenger Otter aircraft and back on a 4-passenger Beaver. We had the same pilot for both flights, and he was quite good. In spite of the advanced age of both aircraft, they seemed quite air-worthy and performed well. The weather was still rainy and generally miserable, but from our vantage point in a covered (but NOT enclosed) boat we were able to (finally!) see a mother bear and two cubs come to the shore near us and feed. We were anchored near where a small creek emptied into the bay, and salmon had begun their annual run up the creek … thus, the presence of bears seeking fish. Even though this involved 2 hours of waiting in wet, cold conditions, we were rewarded with quite a show from the bears. They, of course, were in their natural setting and VERY close by. We didn’t feel endangered, though, because they were so completely focused on the salmon and not us! (See photos below.) Several small boats of salmon-fishing tourists were in the water near us, and the bears paid them little attention as well. Our guide for this voyage is a Ph.D. naturalist who, together with his wife, fostered 3 cubs a number of years ago and is quite knowledgeable about bears in the wild. He was very interesting to listen to, and I’ve enjoyed reading one of several books he has written.

We enjoyed a small, sumptuous meal at the lodge. The meal included fresh “wild caught” salmon prepared by a chef somewhere on the grounds of this tiny, exclusive resort. We enjoyed the refreshing lunch while enjoying views of the lake with sea planes coming and going.

After returning to Kenai, we dried off and prepared for tomorrow’s move to Seward.