Apricot Sunrise Reflections – Keku Islands. Kake, Alaska.
Serene, yet expectant, a sunrise of high promise.
The sea remains calm, but seen from above, the rocky Keku Islands streak across the surface of Keku Strait as if racing in blurred speed.
I want to return to this landscape rich with seals, humpback whales, marbled murrelets, and salmon.
Bright Silver Salmon. Juneau, Alaska. August brings Coho Salmon, aka Silver Salmon, flooding back to the streams of Southeast Alaska. Glistening, powerful fish, I love wading out to fly fish or spin fish in the saltwater channels.
Follow the lives and deaths of salmon if you want to trace the paths of nutrients & energy in Alaska ecosystems. Salmon feed everyone-humans, bears, gulls, eagles, shorebirds, other fish, insects, crabs. EVERYTHING.
And salmon die in the streams after spawning, bringing nutrients to forests and other streamside plant communities.
I thank the salmon when they give their lives to me. Eating these salmon unites me with their lives and the endless circle of my generations and theirs. The salmon and I are one with the landscape.
Transfixed by Wonder Light. Icy Strait, Alaska.
If I had been driving in a city, I might have abandoned my car to gaze at the light of gold in Icy Strait.
Fortunately, I simply walked to the stern of the Wilderness Explorer where I remained until my return to earth.
Far into the brilliance, a fishing boat slipped across between the black edges of the terrestrial world.
On an @UnCruise.
What a surprise to discover George Island hiding at the intersection between Icy Strait and Cross Sound!
I had never heard of George Island, even though I’d passed it a number of times on the M/V Curlew, the USFWS research vessel that hauled people and equipment to Icy Bay farther west along the Gulf of Alaska.
Cross Sound funnels the Pacific Ocean into Icy Strait. Icy Strait provides passage to the northern end of Southeast Alaska.
It’s only 118 km (73 miles) as the raven flies from Juneau. Of course, it’s much farther by boat: 194 km (119 miles), following the saltwater jigsaw puzzle of SE Alaska islands & channels.
I’ll cover various cool SE AK (Southeast Alaska) destinations and adventures in future posts. For now, it’s enough to know that George Island was one of the stops as Guest Hosts on our second 1-week cruise, UnCruise’s Northern Passages & Glacier Bay itinerary.
On the evening before we headed to George Island, I thanked Capt. Don Johnson for showing me yet another new place in Southeast Alaska.
“We’ll see how the weather is in the morning,” he answered.
He didn’t say this lightly. In December 1943, Lt. Schwamm of the U.S. Navy requested a seaworthy vessel to supply his base on George Island because his boats couldn’t handle the seas that were “so violent and the water so rough in Cross Sound, South Inian Pass, and Icy Straights”.
The tides are predictable. Winds, waves, rain, often change rapidly in this high energy ecosystem. The currents in Inian Pass are faster than any other place in Southeast Alaska. This energy mixes the saltwater, bringing food into the water column, a rich feeding “ground” for marine organisms ranging from the barnacles on the rocks to the 40-ton humpback whales feeding on krill and herring. Sea birds are everywhere. Sea otters float on their backs like slightly potbellied very hairy youngsters floating on inflatable matresses with their toes in the air and constantly grooming to be sure that their hair is mussed up perfectly. I feel like sea otters with money could be one of the biggest markets for mirrors worldwide… and for selfie sticks.
We had a rare, very calm-water day at this point where the Pacific Ocean funnels down to the narrow Inian Passage & Icy Strait. If you draw a line straight west across the curving surface of the Earth along George Island’s latitude of 58 degrees 13 minutes North, it will cross Kodiak Island & Bristol Bay in Alaska, then see nothing but open ocean until it reaches the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia.
This is pretty close to the same track on which storms born in the Aleutian Islands travel as they spin their way across the Gulf of Alaska to make landfall on the west coast of North America, including Southeast Alaska.
My thanks to Capt. Don Johnson & the excellent folks of @UnCruise Adventures vessel, M/V Wilderness Explorer, for teaching me a new lost place.
A great joy for me.
Stay tuned for more posts of the brilliantly colored tidepools, rocky pillars & white-foam waves from this nearly-impossible-to-get-to-place, along with its fascinating history as a Naval gun emplacement to protect the U.S. from attacks in World War II.
Don’t confuse this George Island with famous St. George Island in the Pribilofs of the Bering Sea.
Waterfall in Rudyerd Bay. Misty Fjords National Monument. Ketchikan, Alaska.
First stop on cruise from Ketchikan to Juneau with @Uncruise.
We anchored overnight, then launched kayaks in this spectacular fjord with soaring rock walls and beautiful waterfalls
A fantastic start for our adventure as guest hosts.
No internet or cellular coverage most of the time
Posting this from Wrangell, Alaska on day 4.
Kayaking among granite walls above saltwater, Rudyerd Bay. Misty Fjords National Monument. Ketchikan, Alaska.
To kayak here is to get a sore neck as I follow the ridgeline with my gaze.
Glacially carved and polished, the walls continue to plunge down xxx meters (xx feet), testimony to the powerful ice that once flowed down this flooded valley.
Named for John Rudyerd, engineer who designed a lighthouse for England’s New Eddystone Rock in 1703. (Info from Patricia Roppel’s book: Misty Fiords National Monument, Alaska, Farwest Research, Wrangell, AK.)
Rudyerd Bay is the most visited fjord in Misty Fjords, but since we had anchored overnight, we were alone.
We departed and turned north toward Walker Cove and the Chickamin & Unuk Rivers before any day cruisers from Ketchikan arrived.
Kate and I are excited to join Uncruise (click the image to go to the Uncruise website) tours for a couple of weeks in May as guest hosts. We’ll provide inside looks into life in Southeast Alaska, this place we love where we’ve raised our family.
Nugget Falls roars into Mendenhall Lake, Juneau, Alaska. Follow the creek as it flows into Mendenhall Lake (frozen), and you can see the foot of the Mendenhall Glacier in the distance.
The snowy peak prodding the blue sky is Mount Stroller White (1,570 m; 5,150 ft). The forested ridgeline in front of Stroller White that ascends to the left is one of the shoulders of Mt. McGinnis (1,289 m; 4,228 ft).
Nugget Creek arises from Nugget Glacier, flowing down a valley that separates Mount Bullard (1,288 meters; 4,225 ft.) from Heintzleman Ridge. My IG Post from 11/27/2017 shows me on cross country skis with Mount Bullard in the background.
A dam and a 198-meter (650-foot) long tunnel were constructed by the Treadwell Company during the heyday of early hardrock gold mining in Juneau. This hydroelectric facility provided electricity from 1912 to 1943, just one of a number of hydroelectric plants that put Juneau at the forefront of early industrial use of electricity, including electric locomotives.
Nugget Falls is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Juneau along with the Mendenhall Glacier. It’s also one of our favorite 30-minute hikes of exceptional beauty and the power of the waterfall.
The sun sets behind the Chilkat Range of mountains as my 18-foot (5.5 meter) skiff named “Footloose” floats at Handtroller Cove, Southeast Alaska. Click the picture for my video taken from Shelter Island, our base for camping and kayaking. The dark low island beyond the skiff is Lincoln Island.
The Chilkat Range in the distance is inaccessible wilderness once you get past the narrow shoreline. Westward, the vast sharp mountains and glaciers give way to Glacier Bay. Fly beyond Glacier Bay, and you’re looking at the Alsek River watershed, the largest continuous designated wilderness in the world. Browse my blog to find a variety of posts about reefs and ecology of the Handtroller Cover area, and also about the spectacular beauty of the Alsek River.
Handtroller Cove is a dimple of an indentation on Favorite Channel, but the junction of Chatham Strait and Lynn Canal, two of the largest channels in Southeast Alaska, must be crossed to reach the Chilkat Mountains from here.
All of the major sea channels in Southeast Alaska follow geological fault lines that run from the southeast to the northwest. The channels have been carved by glaciers during the ice ages, giving them steep shorelines and surprising depths.
The water under the boat is only 6 ft (1.8 m) deep. But between the boat the Chilkat Mountains in the distance, the depth reaches 1,900 ft (579 m). If you imagine what the landscape would look like if there was no water, you would be standing on top of a mountain with steep slopes leading down into a 1900 ft (579 m) valley!
Kate Troll (@katetroll) shares a moment of peace and beauty among the icebergs of Alsek Lake, Southeast Alaska, near Dry Bay on the Lost Coast. Kate & I have been living in & exploring Alaska for 40 years. She combines her adventures here and around the world with her long career as a leader in environmental conservation, and her thoughts about hope in the face of climate change, in her book: “The Great Unconformity: Reflections on Hope in an Imperiled World”.
Just one more magnificent highlight on our float trip down the Tatshenshini River to the Alsek River, which runs through Alsek Lake before emptying into the Gulf of Alaska at Dry Bay. 11-day trip with 10 friends through 3 Canadian and USA national parks that combine into largest designated wilderness in world.
The powerful Alsek River flows under the mile-wide ice berg jam from huge glaciers that calve into the lake, and exits around a large island. The ice can completely block the exit, forcing rafters to get picked up here by bush plane. We hiked in to scout a route, and were able to find an open channel between the shoreline the ice jam, the eerie growl of river going under the ice off to our port side, forcing us to row far out into Alsek lake.
Video-Juneau Icefield viewed from Astar 119 helicopter just above Taku Inlet, probably over Norris Glacier. The helicopter pilot is our son, Rion Hanson. Although named the Juneau Icefield, it extends 140 km (87 mi) north to south and 75 km (47 mi) east to west, making it the 4th largest icefield in the Northern Hemisphere.
Era Helicopters has a dog sledding camp on the icefield for summertime tours, with access only by helicopter. I’ve flown over different parts of the icefield during the last 40 years, and it remains one of the most astoundingly beautiful places I’ve seen. At its thickest, the ice is 1,400-meters (4,590 ft.) deep!
While valley glaciers like the Mendenhall, Eagle, Herbert, and Taku Glaciers near Juneau flow down close to sea level, the vast ice field is completely invisible from saltwater and cities.