Last Steps

Posted by Erin on 28 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, southwest alaska



Foggy point

End of the Line

We went to Scotch Cap because it was the closest to where we couldn’t go.

In 1946, a tsunami swept the shores of Unimak Island, destroying the Scotch Cap lighthouse at its southwestern tip.
From our viewpoint at the ruins, blue-grey smudges of land appeared on the southwestern horizon - the next few islands in the chain. Huge container ships cruised past, heading back and forth to Asia. The Aleutian chain was only beginning. But for us, it was the end of the line.



Sorting food

Unimak Island is the outer limit of the bear’s range, the outer limit of the caribou’s range, and the outer limit of the packrafter’s range. Twelve treacherous miles of Unimak Pass, with strong currents and the Aleutians’ ever-present winds, stood between us and the next island’s shore. It was beyond the reach of our tiny yellow packrafts.





Packraft and misty spires

Scotch Cap was a goal we’d been thinking of for over a year. But it was never really the goal. Just a wiggle in the coastline, a sea stack with a screaming eagle defending its nest, an arbitrary ‘farthest point’ in a journey that has been its own goal. Unremarkable even compared to this last leg’s adventure.



Rescued by Dental Floss


Launching

As I said in the last post, the crossing to False Pass was the last expected obstacle of the journey. But this is an adventure, after all - even in June, even on the “Victory Lap”. And adventure is all about the unexpected.





Beach walking

It was dusk, nearing midnight on our third night out, as we chatted around the cook fire. We were sitting on one of Unimak’s black sand beaches, listening to the gurgling of a small creek, the crackling of our fire, and the humming engines of fishing boats parked just offshore, running their giant lights. There were three of us now. Our friend Eric had flown out from Anchorage to join us on this last leg of the journey.





Foggy beach

We were only kidding when we said we should take knives to all his gear, to give him a real sense of all the wear and tear we’d seen on a 12 month journey. The bear wasn’t kidding.





Lava sea cave

Eric was the first to head up towards our shelter.

Eric: “Guys - we have a problem.”

Hig and I hurried to follow Eric up the small rise that separated our cookfire from the already-set-up tent. On Unimak Island - a place where the 900 bears vastly outnumber the 60 or so people - I knew what a “problem” was likely to be.

Erin: “We don’t have enough thread!”


After the bear


Staring down at the tattered mess that minutes before had been our happy home, that was my first reaction. The bear had managed to slash holes in nearly every panel of our 8-panel pyramid shelter. It had punctured all three Thermarests, gleefully shredding one into at least a dozen little pieces. One packraft was torn open. Several drybags were bitten through, leaving toothmarks in our passports and credit card. Inside a pouch of Eric’s pack we found shattered glass and dark stains, all that remained of his iodine bottle. The bear stepped on a paddle blade (cracking it). The food that was up there was largely ignored, save for one bag of mangoes and half a package of red chili tortillas.



Shelter repairs

The bear retreated as soon as we discovered him. But it was quickly getting dark. Raining. And we were left with the fragments of our gear. Even had we decided to cut the trip short, the several-day walk back to False Pass in the rain was hardly a good option with no shelter. We briefly considered paddling one of the intact packrafts out to a parked fishing boat.

Eric: “What are we going to ask them for? Thread?”

Hig: “A tarp. But lets first see what we can repair…”





Eric

Spring was progressing into the first hints of summer. No high passes or wide crossings lay before us. I had been hoping, here at the end of it all, for an easy, pleasant finish. But instead, we were left where it seems like we always are - solving our problems with whatever we have at hand. Luckily one spool of dental floss (which we carry for repairs) contains an amazing amount of thread.





Creek and waves

Hig took the first shift, sewing until he couldn’t hold his eyes open. Fearing the bear might return, lured by pleasant memories of tearing Thermarest, at least one person was awake all night. The two other people tried to sleep curled under packrafts on the sand, slowly getting wetter and wetter. When I woke up the first time, I could squeeze the water from the hood of my puffy coat. But like all long nights, the night did end. With the arrival of daylight, we had three pairs of busy hands, needles flying along bear-claw gashes, slowly whip-stitching fraying tears into new tough scar tissue. I sat crosslegged in one corner of the shelter, sewing hole after hole. Eric lay on his back on the other side, working from the inside out. Hig was outside, carefully sewing the packraft back together. Slowly, amazingly, our gear began to take shape again. We heated sand by the fire, then stirred it with cooler sand until it was below boiling - to warm us and dry gear beneath the increasingly waterproof shelter.



Next island

The rain even let up by early afternoon. In 31 person-hours of repairing we had two feet of tear sewn on thermarests, two feet on the raft, a crack over a foot long repaired on the paddle, and a total of 24 feet of tear sewn shut on the shelter. One thermarest was beyond our rescue, and we let the dry bags go - stuffing our gear into the remaining intact ones. By 7:00 we we ready to go.

Cliffs in the Fog



Grassy bluffs

What would there be to see on Unimak Island? By the time we left False Pass, a good part of my mind was already straying towards the future, itching for a life with a little more than a worn out piece of fabric between me and the weather. After walking the entire Alaska Peninsula, would the first Aleutian Island offer anything new?





Exploring ruins

Of course. After four thousand miles of looking, there’s only more to see. We notice the calls of the birds, shifting along with each transition in the landscape. As we walked to the far end of the island, the last scrubby bushes gave way to sweeping fields of tundra and broken lava, and deeply incised gullies in hills of grass and wildflowers. We watched each new plant finally coming out to bloom. Crisscrossing bear tracks on the black sand beaches. Seagulls and eagles nesting on sea stacks and lava cliffs. Bright green springs bursting from volcanic hillsides. Just in the last week of travels, the grey-brown branches of the alders finally burst into green. The only thing that gets old is the wind, and the rain.





Scotch Cap

On the map, Unimak Island is dominated by the imposing presence of four major volcanoes. On the ground, we hardly saw them. Swirls of mist and fog draped our world, shrouding spires and columns of volcanic rock in a blanket of moody grey. With the warmth of the “summer” came the arrival of the rain.





Cape Sarichef White Alice site

Light calm mist turned to pelting wind-driven rain, and back to mist again. We cheered the dry times. We were eternally grateful for the success of the shelter repair. It was the wettest we’d been since last fall, before the snows came.

Dismal Fortress





Wildflower bear trails

It was at the end of one of the wettest days - a day of pelting wind driven rain - a day where we’d been packrafting around the southwestern tip of the island until the winds got too strong - a day when everything we owned was sodden - that we reached the dismal fortress. We were at least three miles from the old White Alice site when we saw it. Giant towers and radar dishes rising in the mist on the crest of a distant ridge. And to us, it meant only one thing: the possibility of walls and a roof.





Cold and wet

We dried out by a fire built of old doors and planks on the landing of a fifth floor stairwell, wind drafting so hard that a piece of plywood released into the air would fly out a hatch in the roof, vanishing upward into the dark. It was an old military communications site, crumbling into spooky decay. The huge concrete building didn’t just creak in the wind. It shrieked like a banshee. It howled and crashed, groaned and thrummed, throbbed and knocked. It pounded as if a whole company of ghostly soldiers was sprinting up the stairs to kick us out.



The End of Hunger



Under grey skies

I wish I could blame the bear for our food troubles. It did eat one bag of mangoes, took one huge bite out of a package of tortillas, and cost us nearly a day’s travel in repairs. We think it may have eaten some cheese. But mostly, I blame the sun.

When Eric arrived in False Pass to meet us, it was a brilliant day. The gorgeous sun shone down upon us in a light breeze, with the peak of Roundtop Mountain poking out of the clouds. We’d been waiting all day for his Pen Air flight to come in, and when it finally did, we were eager to leave as soon as possible.



Surf under fog

We spent days on this last leg dissecting the possibilities. Could Eric really eat that much more than us? Had we really all pigged out so much the first three days? How had the food calculation that had served us so well for the past year (2 pounds per person day) have failed us so badly? Did the bear eat some other food we didn’t remember we brought? In the end, we were left with our own hasty stupidity: Piles of food to stay in False Pass, piles of food to come with us, hastily arranged on the lawn, and easily mixed up.



Sandlocked ship

Not that it mattered. All our piles of wonderful spring greens added flavor but few calories to our meager meals, and we carefully rationed the food we had remaining: this bag of Buttery Goodness and bit of pasta to get us through Fisher Caldera, another few meager ziplocs for another piece of terrain, a last meal of mashed potatoes and a few gulps of lemonade to get us home.





Home

Hunger is so rare in our wealthy American world. Not dieting, not fasting, but hunger - where the thing you want most in the entire world is food, and there’s absolutely no way to get it. It seems strange to me that I won’t have to worry about it any longer. I wonder how long it will take me to lose my taste for a stick of butter per pot of food, to lose the instinct to calculate price per calorie every time I’m in a store…

Don’t leave yet



How far to False Pass?

This is the final leg of the journey, and I’m leaving you with a post relatively empty of reflection - few hints of the future. I’m typing this from a computer in the library of a tiny Alaskan village that I just walked to, reveling in eating our new stashes of food. We still haven’t stepped on any form of motorized transport for over a year. To me, this is all very normal. And the end of the journey hasn’t really sunk in yet.

The walking may be over, but we aren’t done. And this blog isn’t done. With a more continuous connection to the outside world, I have so much more to say. Stay tuned for reflections on the journey, as well as lots more photos (including larger ones) and videos, gear reviews, recipes (don’t you all want Buttery Goodness?), more on the places and issues we’ve been exploring. And of course, on the larger scale, you all want to read my book and watch the movie. :) (one of the reasons Eric came out here with us is that we’ll be working on making a film with him). And we have plans already forming for our future adventures…



Drifted bottle

I’ll probably update this about once a week from now on.

Of course, as I’m sure my publishers are eagerly anticipating, my biggest next job is turning this journey into a scintillating book. It’ll be a little while, so click to email me at mckittre@gmail.com with “book” in the subject line if you want me to let you know when it comes out.





Dwarf willow




Water on oysterleaf




Lupines on cinders




Marsh flowers




Bog and hill


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Aleutians at Last

Posted by Erin on 15 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, environment, southwest alaska



False Pass

False Pass

The gravel beach stretched before us, peeling red-painted cannery buildings rising up behind it. Even with my terrible throwing arm, I could have thrown a stone to shore.

Erin: “I don’t see a ‘death scenario’ here,” I said, smiling as I contemplated the hundred yards of smooth water between us and the Aleutians.

Hig: “I don’t even see an ‘inconvenient walk into town scenario’.”



Dewy lupine

The last major obstacle of this journey flew beneath our paddles in twenty easy minutes.

We have a lot of experience maneuvering the packrafts through strong tidal currents. So when folks in the towns around here warned us about the treacherous waters of False Pass, we did what we normally do with such advice (about waters, weather, bears, etc…). We listen, we consider the warnings, but we take it all with a healthy dose of salt. No one but us knows what we can or can’t do - we make decisions based on what we see on the ground. Everyone wants to believe their own little corner of the world is most treacherous.



Fishing drift

But it kept nagging at my mind. It wasn’t the end of the journey, but the one mile of water at False Pass was the final obstacle standing between us and the Aleutian Islands. We’d been telling people we were headed to these mythical islands for over a year now. What if, here at the very end, we couldn’t do it?

I conjured up a mental ‘worst-case’ amalgam of all that I’ve seen the tides can do. The monster lines of whirlpools at the Seymour Narrows, the standing waves of a tidal rapid on Princess Royal Island, the 30 seconds of slack tide between swirling curents and crunching icebergs at the Hubbard Glacier gap… Add to those the wind of the Alaska Peninsula?

There is always a wind. As we walked out of Cold Bay, following an old military road along the flanks of Frosty Peak, the pattern held true. That first night, half tucked in behind knee-high alder brush the walls of our shelter flapped in and out, and we piled extra gear to cut the breeze under the walls. The next day, we had more of the same. It wasn’t really a storm. It wasn’t really much of anything in a place where even a foggy day doesn’t mean calm.

I’ve run out of words to describe the wind. I walked the rocky shores of Morhovzoi Bay to the familiar staccato sounds of my hood flapping around my ears, face a little raw from the continual rush of cold air, wondering if we would ever be able to paddle. Back on the Bering Sea shores, we walked a drift line of king crab legs, strange grey egg sacs, and piles of bird feathers - avoiding “Big Lagoon”, which was uncrossable in this wind.



Eelgrass shores

Long before we reached the False Pass crossing, we’d figured out our plan. We’d sit at the narrow point, watching the currents to see how they shifted and swirled - waiting for a gap in the weather. We’d planned for at least an extra day before we needed to be in town. It was less than a mile. Less than half an hour, even at packraft speed.

A well-trodden bear trail led us out to the shore. It was warm - almost too hot to walk with my fleece suit and dry suit on. A gentle breeze blew from behind us. Sea ducks sat on the kelp, which was stretched out in a gentle current. Not a whirlpool or whitecap in sight between us and the buildings of False Pass. Even an increase in the current wouldn’t do any worse than give us a longer walk along the far shore into town.

The last big expected obstacle of the journey was nothing more than a cheery afternoon paddle jaunt. So I’m looking forward to some unexpected obstacle on our last leg yet to come. :)

Salmon?

As our journey is coming full circle, we’re back into salmon season again. Fry are darting about in the stream mouthes. The village is emptied as folks have gone fishing, and the initial reports are anything but rosy. Is it just the late spring? Overfishing (as our host here in False Pass speculates)? Global climate change? Or more complicated worries we don’t yet understand? The ‘Alaska’ magazine I just picked up from the table here has the Bering Sea pollock crash as it’s top story. One of the common threads of our whole journey is that the places we’ve walked through, both human and wild, are tied to the ocean. They depend on the oceans. And in this day and age, the ocean’s dependability is in question.


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Volcanic Shores

Posted by Erin on 11 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, environment, southwest alaska



The Pavlofs

In the morning, we walked the shore of the Pacific Ocean. In the evening, we shot down through the high spring waters of an unnamed river - into the Bering Sea. We bobbed in the calm waters of Port Moller, watched by flotillas of curious sea otters, who nearly tipped over as they stretched way up above the water to get a good look. A few miles further was a much-anticipated hot springs. Barely four days into this leg, we started thinking we should recommend it to our packrafting adventurer friends.



Framed peak

In the summer of 2001, we ended our first big adventure in Chignik. Ever since then, we’ve been dreaming of coming back to see the rest of the Alaska Peninsula.

What if we had no mission? What if we had no constraints of continuity? No reason to walk from point A to point B other than the sheer joy of travel and exploration in wild lands? This was a leg that had the best of what we love about wilderness travel. Sandwiched between two oceans in a remote corner of the world, filled with wildlife and with a variety of terrain that put us each day someplace totally different… On sandy shores, rushing creeks, cliff-lined bays, rolling tundra plains, hot springs, snowy passes and the flanks of volcanos…



Lava labryinth

Hot Springs

At Port Moller, our hot springs finding luck turned around on us. In fact, this hot springs would have been nearly impossible to miss. The steaming creek running down through the springs was surrounded by the lushest stripe of greens and flowers we’ve seen all year. Someone had helpfully left some towels hanging on the wall of the small cabin next to the pool. The missing window and chinks in the wall left it no breezier than our floorless shelter, and the weather was kind. The food clock was ticking. The ferry clock was ticking. But shortcuts across calm ocean bays had jumped us ahead, and it seemed about time for a day of vacation.




Grub Gulch

Learning to Clam

Step one: Wander out onto the sand flats with half a paddle (shovel) and inflation bag (bucket), and start digging random holes in the rocky sand. Result - a few tiny cockles.





Horsetails in stream

Step two: Walk further onto the sand flats and start looking for holes, scrabbling in the dark muddy sand with bare hands. Result - some worms unearthed, many very thin and tiny white clams, and one half-crushed razor clam.





Bear trail

Step three: Walk even further out on the sand flats. Look for holes, this time discriminating based on size and shape. Plunge bare hands into the sand, careful not to crush the shells. Result - more razor clams than we could fit in our cookpot. :)





Port Moller hotsprings

We crammed our small pot full to the brim, and plunged it into the bubbling pool at the top of the Port Moller hot springs. Further down, in more habitable water, we lounged naked in a rock-dammed pool, eating clams with butter.



A hot bath

Delicious. Addictive. Now that we’ve learned a bit, we’ve been eyeing the sand flats, picking up a couple more clam lunches along the way. Along with all the spring greens (fiddleheads, fireweed, pushki, dock) we’ve been stuffing into the pot, we hardly have room for the spaghetti anymore. We just found our first morel mushroom yesterday. I love spring.



Steaming hotsprings

Between Two Oceans

After the first week of the leg we were starting to think we were almost charmed. The creeks had been full and fast, whisking us down to both the Pacific and Bering Sea coasts. The wind had been calm and favorable, letting us take packraft shortcuts around headlands and across bays. The tides had been in our favor. Even the rain was polite, waiting to start until just after we’d set up our shelter - three nights in a row!



Crowded flowers

But no journey segment is complete without at least a little adventure. After all, we’re still on the Alaska Peninsula. An ever narrowing strip of volcano-dotted land between the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. Folks here at the Cold Bay weather station wrestle with their balloons to launch them in 50 knot winds, providing data for the rest of the country. This is where the weather comes from.





Sapsuk Lake

So perhaps we shouldn’t have been suprised, even on the 5th of June, to wake up to snow. Hig and I have had an ongoing guessing game about when we’d hit the last snowfall of the trip(under 1000 feet of elevation). The first guess was April 28. Followed by May 1. Then June 1. All proven wrong, as we peered out under the edge of our shelter to see fluffy flakes the size of quarters, drifting down and sticking to the sprouting spring greens.



One (last?) snowstorm

By itself, the snow was more ironic than problematic. But in the shelterless flats before the Pavlof volcanos, the wind that followed was not so easy. With a tail wind, we’re willing to walk with a gale - even with driving rain or sleet. With a head wind, we opted to wait it out, snuggling down into the sleeping bag at 4PM and waiting for the sounds of songbirds to replace the rattling of the tarp - signaling the return of slightly more hospitable weather. The half day lost is most of the reason we walked into Cold Bay a bit hungry, with the few packets of oatmeal and bag of bean flakes weighing less than the food bag we carried them in. 13 days is one of our longer stretches between seeing people, and we’ve definitely appreciated the hospitality here. :)



New snow

We took a relatively straight route between Perryville and Cold Bay, but as the peninsula twists and turns, it brought us over three passes - to the Bering Sea, back to the Pacific, and back to the Bering Sea again, through whatever the weather had to offer. The first pass left us reeling in the face of huge gusts driving down the mountain, trying to keep our balance as we scrambled steep snow and scree. The second brought us a snowstorm. And the third pass left us high in the clouds, able to see exactly nothing while we tried to compass navigate high ridgelines. It didn’t help that the ridgeline had been mapped when deep snow had filled gulches in it, leaving them unmapped. Over a thousand feet above the line of the last vegetation (only roughly 1000 feet here), we marveled at the sheer number of recent bear tracks, and wondered what inspired the bears to visit these realms of snow and lava.



Lava field camp

Anniversary

June 9, 2008. One day short of Cold Bay. The exact one-year anniversary of the start of the trip. A year ago, we walked out of the heart of urban Seattle, amid a crowd of friends and family, most of whom we haven’t seen since. After a year, we walked the remote valley of Joshua Green River, with no companions other than the birds and the bears. When we began, my brain was full of intense and swirling emotions - exhaustion from all our preparations, relief at finally beginning, excitement about what was to come, and trepidation about what we were getting into. One year later, short on food in a valley full of bears, mostly what I felt was comfortable. It was simply another ordinary day in a rather non-ordinary place, on a journey that is in some ways “extreme”, but mostly simply our life.



Steaming crater

Swirling Issues

Here in the Izembek Wildlife Refuge (migratory bird heaven), the refuge is embroiled in a controversy with the community of King Cove, which would like to build a road through the refuge to get access to Cold Bay’s fancy airport with the 2-mile-long runway. Offshore on the Bering Sea side, oil and gas leases are planned for the North Aleutian Basin. I’d love to have something insightful to say about the issues swirling through my brain as we travel through this region. But in the course of walking through so many places, meeting people with so many different perspectives, we’ve become even more wary of having opinions without knowing all the facts.





Lava field

Is a road through a wildlife refuge an unacceptable impact on the bird habitat and an unacceptable compromise to the intent of the congressional designation of the refuge? Or is it unreasonable not to compromise in the interest of economic opprotunity and safety for a village? And if big airport-access is a “need”, do we have an obligation to provide it for the rest of rural Alaska?



Above the valley

Can oil spills be avoided in an ocean of difficult weather and shifting sea ice? If a spill happened, would it be possible to contain that spill before it affected the shallow muddy coast and rich waters that provide critical habitat for fish and birds? In terms of economics and politics, what affects will Bering Sea oil and gas have on our future of climate change and resource shortages?





Izembek lakes

I’d like to know all the answers. Maybe soon, we’ll have time to learn a little more.





Picking fiddleheads


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Ever Changing

Posted by Erin on 26 May 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, southwest alaska



Sun flash on black cinder beach

#%*! the Snow

“The weather outside is frightful… That fire was so delightful… But we’ve got places to go… #%@! the snow! #%@! the snow! #%@! the snow!”

Halfway up a thousand-foot pass above Windy Bay, thigh-deep in postholes, Hig decided to modify the familiar winter carol. The snow was coming thick and fast, but it wasn’t falling. It was blowing up the mountain, quickly accumulating on the ground, the alders, forming a thick white layer on the backs of our coats and backpacks. On May 22nd, we expected to deal with walking on snow in the mountains. We didn’t expect the heaviest snowfall we’ve seen all year.



May 22 snowstorm

As we dropped down towards sea level, the snow turned to sleet, and the gusts picked up to true howling level. Perhaps in shiny new off-the-shelf raingear, we would have been cozily dry, thumbing our noses at the storm. Better yet, a cabin. But the gale-force sleet drove into all the tiny fire holes, leaky seams, and worn-out patches in the drysuits we’ve been wearing for the past few months. In the end, we ended up using the generally effective, but not-so-pleasant strategy of drying out in our warm sleeping bags (we get drier, they get wetter).

The yellow and grey walls of our pyramid whooshed in and out. We listened to the hissing, spattering and splashing as the snow turned to sleet, to hail, to rain, and back again. As the wind whipped the alders, even their roots shook, sending vibrations under our bed. We almost mistook the small earthquake (a nearby 4.2) that night for another big gust. So did the bear hunters in the next bay over. So did the folks in Perryville.



Rushing creek

The tent was really a nice place to be that night. And the next morning. And into the afternoon… With the prospect of being soaked and blown over lurking just beyond our thin sheet of silnylon, we decided to wait out the storm.

Changing Land

Near the village of Perryville, rocks that used to be hit by the tide are now landlocked in fields of grass. Sediment pours from Veniaminoff volcano, building long beaches of glistening black sand, and leaving the cliffy spires of former islands stranded in fields of marshland. Perryville was founded in 1912 - by refugees from the eruption of Katmai volcano further up the coast. And in just that short time, things have been changing dramatically. The land has built out, the grass and alder have moved in where tundra and berries used to grow, and it was less than 50 years ago some of the foks here saw their first moose…



Shore at Stirni Point

Other change may well be coming. Many people know about the controversial Pebble Mine propoal much further to the northeast, but metal deposits come along with the volcanic activity prevalent throughout this region. Full Metal Minerals is exploring for minerals on Native corporation land in some areas we’ve just walked through on our way from Chignik. Oil and gas developments are possible in Bristol Bay, and onshore. There are coal deposits in the region as well. As our world seems to be entering an era of resource crunches, where prices are skyrocketing for all of these commodities, the remote location and lack of infrastructure is less of a barrier to development. People in southwest Alaska will be making the difficult decisions about these issues at the same time as they’re dealing with the crunch themselves (the fuel prices have sent many villages - including Perryville - on a desperate rush to conserve power and get off diesel generators to local power sources such as wind and geothermal).



Stirni Point

Black Sand and Cliffy Spires

Perryville is a very friendly village, located on an incredible stretch of coastline. Though we’ve had precious little sun in this slow late springtime, it hasn’t always been sleeting on us. And though our tolerance for storms is waning after nearly a year spent outside, some terrain can be appreciated in any weather.



Licorice fern

We looked over the Stirni Point pass just past midnight on Friday night - tide rising - crashing waves against dark cliffs the only thing visible in the dim light. At that point, it was perhaps best that we decided to scuttle our plans to race to Perryville by the 1PM post office close on Saturday, deciding that we could deal with the Memorial Day holiday more easily than a pitch-dark scramble.



Marshlands

Seals poked their round grey faces above the waves, peering at us as we walked the boulders - looking for a way around the headland the next morning. A pod of sea otters drifted along in the kelp. Sea lions appeared and disappeared offshore. One lone songbird sang his “tweeee tweeee twooo” on the grassy slope - far from his brethren in the brush patches. There wasn’t a way around. But in the rare patch of nice weather, we didn’t mind - pausing to cook lunch with a scenic view and a selection of fresh spring greens. Despite eating a pile of food, we backtracked around the headland heavier than we’d arrived. Leaf fossils, quartz crystals, assorted interesting rocks… Beachcombing is proving an irresistable hazard to the principles of light backpacking.



Kametolok River

From a pass to a bay to another pass to another bay… With the wind seemingly always against us and nearly always strong, we’ve not managed to paddle around a single headland. After being blown repeatedly upstream, we had to abandon one of our river packraft attempts as well. But looking at the online forecast, the dire swirling lows seem to have left us - at least for the moment.



Scramble to the coast

We arrived in Perryville with the help of a pair of blue ropes - left on a cliffy scramble trail by someone in the 70s (we gave them a good tug and not too much weight). And we’re being generously hosted by the Kosbruks and other folks here in Perryville (thanks to John for letting us get our packages despite the holiday!)



Near Perryville

Other Stuff

Here’s a link to a webcomic strangely appropriate to this adventure

And another great video Eric put together from our clips. All I can say is #%@! the snow!


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Bear Season

Posted by Erin on 21 May 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, environment, southwest alaska



Bluff top bear trail

Springtime Serenades

It was well before dark when we wriggled into our cozy sleeping bag, under our homey yellow-and-grey roof, in an alder patch well away from the thoroughfares of the bears. Listening to the sounds of the songbirds…

Hig: “That bird sounds exactly like R2D2 from Star Wars.”

Erin: “It does!”



Aniakchak gates

We listened again, unable to keep ourselves from bursting out laughing every time we heard the ever changing call of high-pitched buzzes and beeps. The song of each new returning bird gives me a sudden jolt - like running into an old friend in an unexpected place. Sounds that are so familiar from the summer, but almost forgotten through the long cold months… Now in the long days of May, it’s hard to remember not being surrounded by their constant chorus.

One of my favorites is the “Tweee Tweee Twoooooo” bird. Smaller than the palm of my hand, we find him perched on the twigs at the top of the bushes, tiny chest puffed out huge and quivering with the effort of making such a big noise. In addition, we have the “R2D2 bird”, the “Twee Tweedledeedee” bird, the “I’m ready I’m ready I’m ready” bird, the “Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo” bird, and the few, like cranes and ptarmigan (the “giggling chicken”), for which we know more widely used names.



Aniakchak river

Once we crossed through the snowy crater of Aniakchak, and over to the Pacific side of the Peninsula, I began to believe that spring was here for good. We saw our first flowers - smaller than a pinky nail - on a gravelly ridge top. We ate our first spring greens, adding pushki shoots to a ramen-and-butter soup. One thing for spending an entire Alaska winter outdoors: I don’t think I’ve ever been so ecstatic to see a flower or eat a fresh vegetable in my entire life.

Bear Season



Pinnacle mountain

It was on a cinder plain just over the mountains from the Aniakchak River that we first saw them. We’ve been studying tracks for the past 11 months - diamond shaped prints of wolves and foxes, river otters slithering on snow, platter-sized bear paws, and the tiny feet of squirrels and voles… But these were different. Elongate, with a pointed toe and rounded heel, and strange bumps and ridges all across the surface. Human tracks!



First flowers

I can count on one hand the number of people we’ve encountered on this trip who were camping out in the wilderness - and we saw all of them last summer. In the week since we left Port Heiden we’ve met three separate groups of bear hunters, and seen the tracks of at least three more. May 10 through May 25th is bear hunting season. And in this short space of time the bear hunters are out in force, leaving tracks across wild lands where another human may not be seen until the next bear season.

All of the folks we’ve run into were nice. But there’s still something creepy about walking a beach where camoflaged men with high-powered spotting scopes are crouched down watching us from the top of the bluffs - able to see the expressions on our faces from half a mile away.

When I meet the bear hunters, I wish them luck. When I see the bears, I wish them luck too.



North Fork Creek

I’m not against trophy hunting.

I was raised a city girl in the heart of urban Seattle. I loved the wilderness. But given that my childhood wilderness experience consisted of well-used hiking trails, I rarely saw any wildlife of significant size or abundance other than my fellow homo sapiens. I knew basically nothing about hunting, thought about guns mostly as instruments of city crime, and somewhere in the back of my head my attitude towards hunting could probably be summed up roughly as: “Drunk rednecks shooting cute wild animals”



Packraft in the grass

I started making trips up to Alaska in 2000. And here, I was introduced to the new-to-me concept of “wildlife as food.” At the end of 2001, I found myself helping drag a just-shot caribou onto the deck of the boat we were hitching a ride on. I was a little leery of being served fresh caribou heart, but it wasn’t bad. And over the years, I’ve seen how important wild game is - both for food, and as a way that people stay connected to the land. It’s part of the way people have always lived here. How could I object to meat hunting?

But trophy hunting? Rich folks flying in from the lower 48 and killing bears just to stuff and mount them in a living-room display case?



On grassy dunes

I like bears. On this last leg, we’ve watched a pair of beautiful golden bears run up the ridge when they saw us coming down the Aniakchak River. We’ve watched one grazing piles of rotten kelp on the beach, one slowly lumbering up a bluff-top trail, another walking the breathtakingly steep cliff edge above Hook Bay… On the bluff tops over the Pacific coast, their trails were muddy furrows cut deep into the grass and the tundra - the sharp-clawed imprints of recent bear feet over the regular, rounded depressions left by generations of them. We walked in their footsteps, marveling at how some of the piles of old bear scat looked to be composed of nothing but beach gravel. We don’t eat gravel. But like the bears, we go everywhere, are constantly eating everything available, and are relatively wily creatures (I hope). More than any other animal out here, the bears remind me most of ourselves.



Coast waterfall

In Kujulik Bay, we stood around a fresh bear hide, laid out on a tarp with the bloody skull beside it, talking to a pair of friendly Georgia hunters and their two guides. They plied us with juice and snacks as we stood in the chill breeze and intermittent drizzle, chatting as they waited for the plane that would whisk them and the bear skin back to the great indoors. This was their way of seeing the wild country, and as any trophy hunter will tell you, they pump a lot of money into the economy for the privilege of bringing back that big bear’s hide.





Hook Bay

A bear is a living resource. Like a moose, like a salmon, like a tree. They’re born, they grow, they die, and new bears are born to replace them. I may feel a greater personal kinship with a bear than a spruce tree, but its hard to see an argument to treat them differently. Fishing, hunting, logging… As I mentioned in a previous post, the more we think about all these issues, the more we come to believe that sustainability is the key. As currently practiced, logging in Alaska is anything but sustainable. Salmon fishing seems to be doing pretty well. And as for hunting, it’s all up to Fish and Game - theoretically setting their rules to maintain a stable population. Out here on the Alaska Peninsula, we walk a land crisscrossed with bear trails incised two feet deep into the tundra. I don’t know as much as I’d like to, but there’s no indication that they aren’t doing their job.



Decaying cabin

But what about the wilderness? Managing wild resources for sustainable human use is something to strive for here, and in most of the world. But I wander remote lands because I value what they are - not just the existence of healthy wildlife populations, but the very wildness of them. A world where things aren’t tamed and controlled for the benefit of humans. A system that doesn’t need to be managed… it functions just fine on its own. Though the locals living within them might grumble at the rules, I’m glad we have parks.

I won’t be sorry when bear season ends in a few days, and we have the coast to ourselves again. But in the meantime - good luck to the hunters, and good luck to the bears.



Turquoise creek mouth

The Crazy World Out There

We might be the first to know the news of the birds and the animals, but for the past year we’ve only ingested “real news” in strange discontinuous snippets as we pass through villages. I’m not surprised to see our never-ending presidential race still continuing. But each time we hear it, oil prices have reached a crazy new high (less than $70 when we left), food prices have risen along with them, folks out here can’t buy rice anymore, and flour and oil are far more expensive… What’s going on out there? Is peak oil here? Are people paying attention to how fast the world is changing? It seems that even as we travel, some of the sustainability issues we’ve been thinking about are growing more critical.



Hole In The Wall

But in the meantime, it’s bright and sunny here in Chignik Lagoon this morning, and I’m eager to finish up our organizational chores and head out toward Perryville.


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Natural Hazards

Posted by Erin on 11 May 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, southwest alaska



Crossing paths

Crossing paths

When it was day-old tracks in the mud, he yelled “Bear!” And when it was an actual bear, he whispered “video camera”. Hig will claim he was actually trying to get across both concepts - that I should both pass him the video camera and ready my pepper spray. All I can say is what I heard. Unable to see from my vantage a few steps back in the willow brush, I thought Hig had seen a moose, or maybe a cute little fox he wanted to film…

The bear soon rendered any question of his identity moot, with a slow lumbering run across the tundra. Towards us.



May snow

“Our first spring bear.” Hig said, mostly for the benefit of the video camera.

The pepper spray’s bright orange safety clip lay discarded on the remains of yesterday’s snowfall. I was poised, thumb at the ready, waiting to see what the bear would do.

You’re supposed to talk to a bear. It lets him know you’re a human - or at least that’s what all the books will tell you. But what do you say?

“Hello. I’m a human. And I’m holding something that will make your eyes water, so perhaps you shouldn’t come over here and take a swat with one of those paws that looks about twice the size of my head?”

Or “Hello. I’m a human. And we humans have been using technology to kill you guys for generations, so you should recognize me as more than the fragile slab of meat that I might appear to be?”


Walking a beaver dam


Or “Hello. I’m a human. And whatever you do to me, bears that mess with humans usually don’t end well, so it’s not a good idea?”

Hig was busy with his video camera, leaving me to do most of the talking - which ended up as a series of mostly inane and rather unconvincing attempts to tell the bear to leave.

I wasn’t sure quite what it meant - but I was pretty sure that the drool streaming from the bear’s mouth was not a good sign. He circled, cautiously. Slowly inching closer, stalking behind the willows to peer out at us under the branches… Taking his sweet time deciding.



Cottonwood sunset

He started to leave. He started to return. I held my breath, silently willing the bear’s decision… Then it was finally over. He turned abruptly, and we were treated to the familiar and welcome sight of a bear butt galloping away through the bushes.

We backtracked along his platter-sized tracks, crisp and perfect in the remains of the early May snowstorm.

Erin: “Wow - that’s an enormous bear. Somehow it’s easier to see in context, looking at the tracks, than it is to tell from the bear itself.”

Hig: “I don’t think the ears grow as much as the rest of the bear. So when you see really small ears, that means it’s a really big bear.”



On the bear’s path

I’m sure we’ve encountered well over a hundred bears through the course of our various adventures. This ranks up there as one of the few most frightening. But for a close encounter, also reassuringly normal. As improbable as it seems when I stand face to face with an animal that could crush me with one backhand swat, bears almost always do run away.

The snow has melted. The grass shoots are coming up. Bear hunters are being flown in to all the lodges out here, brimming with dreams of killing a bear like ours. Spring is here.

A mountain spread thin



Aniakchak pumice field

First we saw the names on the map. Pumice Creek. Lava Creek. Cinder River. And as we stepped out of the last cottonwood forests, we stepped onto Aniakchak volcano. Gusts flew down the Cinder River valley, stirring up plumes of fine volcanic sand. Between patches of tundra, we walked on plains of bare pumice gravel. Even 3500 years after the eruption, the kinnikinnik and cranberry plants are still struggling to spread over the empty ground.



Brushy tent

From the ocean, the rim of Aniakchak caldera is hardly a noteworthy mountain. Just a low snowy ridge, far off in the distance. But on the beach, we walked beneath fluted cliffs of pumice, pumice cobbles sinking into the sand beneath our feet. What had once been a great mountain was spread thin across the whole landscape - in the form of pumice, ash, and crushed rock. Hig the geologist scrambled up the cliff to shoot picture after picture of the remains, carefully placing his ice axe as a scale bar. Pumice floats, and at the mouth of each creek, the drift line was almost entirely composed of this strange weightless rock. Washed up on shore were the remains of Aniakchak, a few pieces of cedar floated in from southeast Alaska or Canada, and from across the Pacific - glass balls.

A weighty addiction

Clink, clink, clink… Three netted glass balls swung from Hig’s pack, slapping against one of our narrow drybags. Awkwardly tied on to the outside of his backpack, the drybag was also full of glass balls. The big orange drybag that comprised the majority of Hig’s pack was also entirely stuffed - glass balls, glass balls, glass balls, and a sleeping bag thrown in for padding. My pack was similarly encumbered with as many glass balls as I could fit around our hiking gear. Luckily, we were only 10 miles or so from Port Heiden, and had run just about out of food (save for some peppermints and a small bag of very salty dried salmon), so we had plenty of room.



Sunset grass

Why the addiction to Japanese trash? The sparkle of a glassy green-blue sphere on a field of pumice, lying on the beach, just begging to be picked up… This one frosted, that one an intense shade of green, one with barnacles, with bubbles, with funny indentations, streaks of color, stamps on their base… All just a little bit different. And in some places, they’re a rare beachcombing treasure. Here?

Jack, who runs the grocery store watched us unloading our pile of over a hundred to mail to Seldovia. “I have hundreds in 5-gallon buckets at home. When I want to send them in the mail I usually pack them in apple boxes.”



Fluted pumice bluffs

“Usually about 80% of them make it through the mail without breaking” said one of the teachers. “We’ve got a pile of 1500 in our backyard in Anchorage - we put a fountain in the middle.” Another teacher was planning to sell her horde of 300 to a shop in Oregon. “I might be able to get $5-$10 apiece!”

The postmistress lifted our packed full boxes onto the scale, slapping on a ‘fragile’ sticker. “As long as they don’t rattle too much, they’re generally OK.”

We’re planning to make a window out of them.

Mothers



Japanese trash

My mother and I were joking on the phone the other day about how she could get a new job as an expedition logistics manager. For the past 11 months, she’s been storing a pile of our gear in her basement, mailing out shoes, skis, maps, socks… Running to the store to buy things we can’t find in 50 person villages. We’ll breeze into town, and I’ll call or email, often starting the conversation with some version of: “These are the things we need in the next village, here’s the zipcode, and could you do it soon so it gets there in time?” Only later do we get a chance to catch up on life and news.

So this Mother’s Day, I’d like to take a moment to thank Niki, Dede, Faith, Carolyn, Bert, Edythe, and Janine. All our mothers and grandmothers who are helping, watching, and supporting our journey. And to Huna, who passed away while we were traveling.



Port Heiden school

Schedule

As unpredictable as we’ve been this past year, we are indeed nearing the end of our journey. I’ve just updated the Schedule page to reflect the latest plan. This time, we even have a deadline - tickets to take the ferry from False Pass to Seldovia on June 29, arriving in Seldovia July 1st.


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Hoping for Spring

Posted by Erin on 02 May 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, environment, southwest alaska



Ugashik marshes

“April showers bring May flowers”

A rhyme clearly written for a distant land. May is already upon us, and still the only shower is the flurry of blowing snow outside the window of the Ugashik community center, dusting the bare tundra white.

We walked into Egegik across a river of ice. We walked out on frozen banks along a ribbon of open blue water. Candle ice crumbled into the water with a soft tinkling hiss. Ducks and geese bobbed by in the current. Seagulls wheeled overhead, screeching and screaming. They quietly flew past us all winter, but somehow now, their voices have come back. The sound reminded me of the summer ocean.





Egegik

The river meandered in long lazy bends, and we took off on a shortcut across the grassy marshes. One tuft of grass was a solid ice lump underfoot, while the next squished down into a muddy pool of ice water. Done with ski boots at last, we were ecstatic at the nimble movement afforded by our ordinary hiking shoes (Montrail Hardrocks), though a bit less ecstatic at the long stretches of ice-cold water we had to walk through.



Walking shoes!

The warm sun overhead was quickly melting the land. Sandhill cranes strode through the marshes, their continual stuttering cry like a wet finger squeaking on glass: “I’m a crane! I’m a crane! I’m a crane!” They were the first cranes we’d seen since last fall’s southern migration on the Stikine Delta near Wrangell. The sounds of a dozen other birds we didn’t recognize filled the air as we set up camp in the long evening light. I thought it was spring.



Ice pile on Becherof Lake

Hot springs

As I bundled up against the blowing snow on the flanks of Peulik volcano, I realized we still had a long way to go. I snapped pictures of the first pussy willows, the first few sprigs of wild celery poking through the dirt… But most of the land was still bare and frozen. The bears were nowhere to be seen, a foot of ice covered most of the lakes, and a day above freezing was still something to be longed for.



Pussy willows

We have had terrible luck finding hot springs, and we joked about our chances as we followed Hot Springs Creek through Ugashik caldera. Hig stuck his hand in each promising patch of water, the slick of red slime on the streambed making us hopeful.

Hig: “Hard to tell… It’s warmer than the air, anyway.”

Erin: “So what you’re saying is that this liquid water is above freezing?”



Ukinrek Maars

Hig: “All I’m saying is that there’s still heat in the earth.”

We walked further - past tiny bubbling springs, puddles with a sulfurous tang on the toungue, strange green algae, and everything covered with a thick coat of orangey-red. The only real heat came from a frothing pool, shiny black sand bubbling out of the depths. Unwilling to strip down in the blowing snow, we waded in ankle-deep, warming our feet (still in shoes) as we used the heat of the pool to thaw our frozen snickers bars.



Snowy caldera on Peulik’s flanks

From there, we had thought we might detour out to the Pacific coast again. But deep postholing snow on the hills and the cold wintery weather sent us on a shorter path - along the Ugashik Lakes to the 12 person village of Ugashik.

What the land can swallow

But before we turned, we made one last detour, to visit the old Mt. Demian oil camp near the headwaters of Ugashik Creek. We climbed through willows on a snowy ridge, photographing a few rusting boilers and bits of machinery, and the piles of used up “clinkers” from the coal used to run them. The last remains of a nearly 80 year old oil exploration boom, being swallowed by the land. Rust consumes machinery, and roads vanish into the brush.



Hot springs snow tunnel

The boom and bust of resource exploitation is part of the history of Alaska, ever since the Russians came for sea otter furs. It’d be hard, probably impossible, to find a creek or a beach that hasn’t been visited at some point by a prospector hoping to strike it rich. Large deposits of metal ores lie beneath the tundra. Oil, gas, and coal deposits have been identified all across the state. But Alaska is a difficult place to work. In far-flung places like here on the Alaska Peninsula, many large deposits remain buried. Only a few particularly easy targets, like the oil at Mt. Demian, have even been touched.



Colors in Hot Springs Creek

Most of the traces of long-ago prospectors have already vanished into the land. But as mineral prices skyrocket, the gold, copper, oil, gas, and coal sitting under Alaska’s wilderness isn’t being ignored any longer. A modern resource boom is ramping up.

And modern means big. Mountain-sized operations replace the gold-panning mountain man, creating mountain-sized piles of potentially dangerous waste. And modern means global. Fossil fuels we dig or drill here come back in the form of a changing climate, acidified oceans…


Mt Demian oil camp

We’re lucky up here. We have the chance to look back at the decisions made in other parts of the world. A chance to do things better. Alaska still has an abundance of healthy ecosystems and renewable resources, and a relatively small population. Doing things better doesn’t mean an end to development, and it also doesn’t mean developing every resource that might make someone money. We need to think about how we can live sustainably.



Living within our means



Caribou on the tundra

Sustainability is the equivalent of fiscal conservatism - of living within our means. As a world, we’re on an entirely unsustainable course of consumption, and by definition, anything unsustainable must come to an end, one way or another. We might try to control how gently it will end, and what will replace it. However, it will end.





On the edge of breakup

Sustainability is something Hig and I think about a lot out here, as we talk to folks in these remote communities - all looking for ways to help their village survive. Bristol Bay is one of the few places in the world where there still are cannery towns - flooded in the summer with people, many from Seattle, coming to fish the abundant wild salmon runs. But though the fishing is sustainable, the fuel needed to run the industry and bring goods and people back and forth from such a remote piece of the world is anything but. We see people setting up windmills. We hear people talking about geothermal energy from the volcanoes, methane gas from the swamps, tide-run ice-making machines. No one knows all the answers. But we have to try.


First shoots of spring


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Signs of Spring

Posted by Erin on 20 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, southwest alaska



Bristol Bay bluffs

I bent down to look closely at the muddy beach, examining the fresh imprint of a wolverine’s paw - left only a minute earlier by the dark loping shape we’d watched run along the base of the bluffs.

“Bear!” Hig cried out from beside me.

I looked up, my heart starting to beat a little faster. I quickly scanned the beach for an ursine form, my hand straying to the pepper spray clipped to my chest strap, preparing for a close encounter with a large, potentially irate grizzly.



Abandoned cannery

“First one of the season!” Hig continued, gleefully.

Puzzled, I slowly followed the line of Hig’s gaze. Not along the beach ahead of us, but down, onto the mud. And there, each toe filled with a tiny puddle of water, was the clear impression of a bear’s front foot. It was clearly older than several sets of wolverine tracks, older than the fox tracks, older than the last high tide…

“Don’t say it like that!” I admonished. “Yelling ‘Bear!’ when you’re looking at a track…”



Photo by Bruce A. - us on tundra

“I’m sorry,” he apologized sheepishly. “I was excited.”

Signs of Spring

We’ve left our skis behind - sitting at Ann and Chris’s in Naknek, where they can hopefully be used by some intrepid local kids on future winter camping trips. I was lucky enough to borrow shoes to walk this 50 miles of coast. Our own Montrail shoes were waiting in the Egegik post office. And now Hig’s ski boots, carried long past their natural life span (apparently about 3 weeks), can finally meet their proper end in the Egegik dump.



Last of the trees

We scanned the ground carefully as we walked the tundra, eyes peeled for the first touch of green - debating whether the few green sprigs of club moss were new this year, or just uncovered by the snow. Too early for spring greens, we snacked on the newly-thawed fruits of fall. Last year’s cranberries still clung to their stalks, slightly fermented, staining our fingers with red juice as we knelt down to pick them.



Last of the ski boots

Clinging to depressions in the tundra, small piles of white ptarmigan feathers waved in the wind. Heads dark, and bodies still white, the ptarmigan look suspended betwen the seasons, molting piece by piece to match the newly snow-free ground. Startling us with their unexpected cries (Hig thought it was the voice of a small child at first), a flock of geese fought the wind as they passed us overhead, returning to their summer feeding grounds.

Or perhaps the real sign of spring was the pair of embroidered thong underwear we found in the drift line on an ice-choked shore, making us wonder about the story that led to that particular item being lost on the Bering Sea…

Of Mud and Ice

On the bluff tops between Naknek and Egegik, we were surrounded by plains of golden grass and red-brown tundra, broken only by a few small patches of brush. It almost looked like farmland - until we turned to look down on the swirl of jumbled sea ice, extending over the horizon of Bristol Bay.



Bering Sea beachcombing
(glass ball and embroidered thong underwear)

The parallel lines of a 4-wheeler ’suicide trail’ ended abruptly at the edge of the cliff. Elsewhere along the bluff tops, abandoned cabins clung precariously to the shrinking edge. Looking up from the beach, we could see a room-sized corner of a house from underneath - the ground below it already eroded into the sea. As the sun warmed the sandy bluffs, a rain of dirt tumbled down their steep face. Every year, the storms wash up against the base of the bluffs, and the Bering Sea claims an ever bigger bite of the land…



Bluffs over ice

We’ve passed through the winter and returned to a half-frozen world. Jumbled sea ice is piling on the beaches, mixing with the dirt raining from the bluffs, and turning the shore into an oozing slippery mess of mud. Ice floes are swirling in strong tidal currents, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, covering the mudflats as far as we could see… It reminded me of Knik Arm, and made me thankful that we had no need to try and paddle this chunk of the Bering Sea.

Connaisseurs of Wind



Jumbled sea ice

Smooth and steady, quite dry, cool but not cold, with a strong, robust flavor…

That was the wind we had on the way into Egegik. Leaning into it, wading upstream against the current of air sweeping across the tundra, I reflected on our choice of route. Following the Pacific Rim, through the Lost Coast, the mountain passes, and heading down the Alaska Peninsula, we’ve chosen to pass through some of the windiest possible places.



Last year’s cranberries

We’ve become connaisseurs of wind. Wind that sweeps up from behind, shoving us along. Wind that drives in from ahead, stinging our exposed cheeks and noses. Wind that rattles the brush and flattens the grass, wind that sets the water into a frothing chop, and wind that sends swirls of hissing snow streaming across the ground. Wind that blows for days, as if you’ll never hear silence again. Wind that leaps up in an instant, a roaring tempest that ends as suddenly as it began. Wind that blows sand, or snow, or leaves, or rain, or nothing at all. Wind that funnels through narrow notches in the land, where you can walk from a gale to dead calm in a matter of minutes. Wind that seems to fill the whole world.



End of the forests

Wind blown, wind swept, wind scoured… We’re passing the last few scraggly trees - beyond the “limit of wooded country” marked on the map. Into a land of tundra and volcanoes, and into one of my favorite parts of the world.



Videos

Jumping back in time - a few videos Eric put together from our clips from February:

Grocery shopping in Eagle River

Anchorage to Beluga

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Moods of the World

Posted by Erin on 12 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, southwest alaska



Under a snowdrift

Blowing rain pierced my eyeballs. Hot sun shone on hills of sparkling snow. Frost caked our fur ruffs in near-zero air. A gentle breeze propelled us floating along cobbled sea cliffs. Swirling snow drifts buried our shelter. Fog and snow flurries whited out the world.

As each shift in the weather transformed the land around us, it seemed like we could have seen it all without moving a step. We were moving through the moods of the world. And for the first few days, it seemed that not moving - physically - might have been a much nicer option.



Into the wind on Gibraltar Lake

Moods of the World

I squinted out of the eyeholes of my smurf-blue balaclava, a wet fringe of fur ruff drawn tight against my face, the hood of my coat as battened down and cinched tight as it could get. And I saw my feet. Squelching in soaking wet ski boots, I carefully maneuvered across hillocks of winter-brown tundra, pools of slush and patches of melting snow in between.



Pass above Amakdedori

I looked up, slowly widening my squint to try and get a look ahead of me. Blowing rain stabbed at my face, forcing me to blink, eyes watering, and quickly return to my foot-focused stare. The wind screamed. Howled. Roared. Blinded by rain and sleet, we leaned into the gale, struggling to make even a few miles of progress. Our skis were useless on the snow-free ground. They stuck up as tall triangular peaks above our food-heavy packs, serving only to make us stumble as they were caught by the wind. A day and a half into this leg and barely ten miles from town, I thought wistfully of Kokhanok’s warm school buildings.

And that ten miles was in entirely the wrong direction.



Through snow-drifted boulders

Detours

Dreaming and scheming with a computer and a map, we’d come up with half a dozen different plans to trek through Katmai Park between Kokhanok and King Salmon, each one more indirect than the last. The Pacific coast at Amakdedori wasn’t even on that original list.



Amakdedori cabin

On the third day of fighting against blowing snow and rain, the idea of continuing east to the ocean was quickly losing its appeal. We stopped for yet another discussion in the lee of one of the few small spruce trees, its top whipping in the gale. I was in favor of ditching the plan and turning west toward King Salmon. Hig was still set on Amakdedori. I agreed to go along for another day. Mostly because if I’ve learned anything on this journey, it’s that for good or bad, sooner or later, conditions will always turn around.



Amakdedori shore

Kamishak Bay

Luckily, this time was sooner.

Augustine volcano appeared from the clouds, as sun shone on the flat calm waters of Kamishak Bay. Waterfalls from melting snow made curtains of rain below overhung cliff tops. We paddled alongside, staring up at walls of jumbled concrete - rounded cobbles protruding from sheer faces that hardly looked like they should even hold together.

On top of the bluffs, hundreds of ptarmigan flew from alder patch to alder patch. On the ground, they were like white butterballs running along white snow slopes, visible mostly because of the shadows they cast. Their zigzag trails left the dragging prints of bird feet on nearly every square inch of snow. The trilling chuckle of their calls sounded like a thousand giggling chickens.



Cliff, toppled and cracked

McNeil state game sanctuary. In the summer, tourists pay for the chance to win the lottery to watch bears here. In early April, we shared it with ptarmigan. With fox, otters, tracks of the elusive wolverine, a moose standing alone on a flat grass island not much bigger than a suburban yard… The bears are still asleep. The tourists are still home, dreaming of summer. And the villages that used to speckle these shores are long-abandoned, only small labeled dots on our map. Amakdedori… Chenik… Kamishak… We had heard from Gary, an elder in Kokhonak, that Amakdedori had been abandoned after a flood from the ocean. A flood that left logs 100 feet up on the slopes-perhaps the 1883 tsunami from nearby St. Augustine volcano. Limited by our short visit, but unable to resist a story of disaster, Hig peered at the coastline for evidence. Why were there beaches perched 30 feet above high tide? Why did the low-lying plains near the ocean look scoured?

From Blank to Blowing



Navigating the whiteout

It was like the turning of the tide.

The world was blank as we skied a shelf above McNeil River. Fog hung over the slopes, snow flurries blew in from the ocean behind us, and nearly all the bushes had been long-since buried by the winter’s snow. The sky was the same flat white as the mountains - as white as the snow under our feet.

“I see a something!” Hig cried excitedly - squinting into the distance for the hint of a scrubby alder.

But the somethings were few and far between. Sometimes there was literally nothing to see but Hig’s bright backpack and dark drysuit - cut out against a paper-white world.

We barely had a chance to notice the calm. Suddenly, the world fell silent. Fat snowflakes gently drifted straight down, settling on our hoods and sleeves, tapping quietly. And within twenty minutes, the world had turned around.



Raiding Kulik Lodge

Low pressure on the Bering Sea sends warm wet air streaming west across the Alaska Peninsula from the Pacific Ocean. Low pressure on the Pacifc sends cold dry air streaming the other direction. It was as if someone was trying to even the levels in two glasses of water: having poured too much in from the Pacific side, they quickly turned to pour it back the other way. And in a mountain pass above McNeil Lake, we were right in the spout.

Tent Archaeology





Alpine sunset

I mumbled sleepily at Hig as he tried to explain why we needed to switch the direction of our feet and head in the middle of the night. Something about snow, and tearing walls, and suffocation…? We wriggled around and returned to sleep, ignoring the swirls of snow still blowing on our sleeping bag through the tiny cracks in our well-chinked walls. The thin nylon walls of our pyramid sagged inward under an ever-increasing load of blowing snow.

The switch of the wind had caught us just before dark, and high up in a blank white world, the shelter from the storm we’d managed to find amounted to exactly two boulders. But after an hour spent digging and building a six foot tall snow wall to sleep behind, we figured we’d done the best we could.



Camp in the willows

We woke in a space the size of a small dog house. Bedding down behind a six foot snow wall, we arose in the middle of a six foot snow drift - only the peak of our shelter still standing against the weight. While Hig stepped out to take pictures, that collapsed too.

“I found a cooking vessel!” Hig cried, holding up our blackened cookpot.

“Can you tell by its decorations what sort of culture it originated from?” I replied.

“It must have been an impoverished culture… only soot blackening on this dented aluminum pot.”

Half a kayak paddle in my mittened hands, I was busily shoveling snow off another corner of our flattened shelter. Carefully trying to retrieve all our buried gear, it felt like we were performing archaeology on ourselves.



Cottonwood forest

But the change in the wind brought in the cold clear air and the bright sun. For the next six days into King Salmon, we anxiously awaited the next shift in the air - the next storm to hit us. So far, it hasn’t come…

Buttery Goodness… Gone Bad?

Meager in calories and overpackaged, I’ve never liked Mountain House, or any freeze-dried meals. After eating nine of them over the past few days, I like them even less.

Logistics are hard here. As we travel through southwest Alaska, the villages are small, and stores are often non-existant. The thousand-ish population of King Salmon/Naknek makes this a bustling metropolis compared to where we’ve been and what lies ahead.



Cliffs along Naknek Lake

So we had to estimate, order, and ship food far in advance of when we’d eat it. Inevitably, we calculated wrong. And in this case, it led to a couple of bags of our favorite buttery goodness snack making it all the way from Anchorage to Kokhanok to sit in too-warm a building. And in our usual flurry of activity leaving a town, we didn’t check it.

Sitting on the porch of the closed down and empty Kulik Lodge, I dug to the bottom of the dry bag for one of our last items of food - a big heavy bag of buttery goodness. Breaking off a chunk, popping it in my mouth, a grimace spreading across my face… Ptooh!

I watched the spit out chunk of inedible food land on the snow, with the sinking realization that we were still over 70 miles from King Salmon. And that we had very little left to get us there.



Crossing a pressure crack

Immediately, we switched from the idle curiosity of people poking around a closed-down lodge, to the focused ursine curiosity of people hunting for food. We unscrewed and rescrewed the plates holding doors shut, finding fishing gear, clothes, bedding, toiletries… Searching for anything edible. Eventually, deep in various cupboards and closets, we managed to find 9 packages of Mountain House, a few hot cocoa packets, half a jar of wheat germ… Even the 9 Mountain House “meals” sounds like a lot, it’s only 750 calories x 9 = 6750 calories, a little over half a day of food for the two of us. Not much, but we were lucky the lodge was there. Thank you Kulik Lodge! We did our best to be polite unexpected guests.



Naknek Lake sunset

Luckily, the long ski on Naknek Lake went as smoothly as we could hope for, and though we arrived in King Salmon hungry, we’re refattening now… As I write, Hig’s off trying to figure out where on the Peninsula we’ll be able to buy food in the future, and what we’ll need to mail now. This time, we’re tasting any food left sitting for very long!

King Salmon/Naknek slide show

For anyone local, we’re giving a presentation with a slide show of photos from the trip on Monday night, 7 PM, in the Naknek School Auditorium. Come!

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For a Glimpse of the Ocean

Posted by Erin on 29 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, environment, southwest alaska



Pass above Williamsport

The Aniakchak Effect

Whooosh! Flap flap flap flap! Hisssss…. Each gust pummeled the thin nylon walls of our shelter, sending them whooshing in and out. The wind strained to lift the stakes anchoring the whole fragile creation to the snow - threatening to send our roof out to sea. Swirls of snow blew in under the narrow gaps between the tent and the ground, leaving thin drifts on top of our outer sleeping bag. It was 5 AM. I groaned, and rolled over, tucking my head in the bag so as not to be reawakened by the wet sting of snowflakes on my face. Our shelter was as tucked into the alders as we could get it, but they offered scant protection in this windy corner of Iliamna Bay.

Of course, we knew better.



Pile Bay on Lake Iliamna

We call it the “Aniakchak effect”, in honor of a memorable night we spent on the floor of Aniakchak crater in a late August gale back in 2001. Intuitively, it seems like hiding a camp from the wind should be the simplest thing in the world. Find a lee, and get behind it.

In Aniakchak crater, knee-high vegetation was the best we could get. But we were sure we’d be fine. We had a really big lee to hide behind. A 500 foot cliff, in fact. At first this seemed like a great place. Just an occasional gust. But as the storm grew, we realized that the gusts were in some ways worse than the steady screaming of the wind on the open crater floor. The wind poured over the edge of the cliff and swirled in great eddies behind it. We’d escaped the steady blow, only to place ourselves at the mercy of enormous and unpredictable gusts that came from every possible direction. It was a long, cold night.



Ptarmigan tracks

Here, we were just around the corner from the wind funnel of Williamsport, behind the lee of a high ridge. And we’d put ourselves squarely in the same situation. Seven years later, our camping gear is light years better than it was on that first adventure. And we slept quite well despite the racket and snow. But as we listened to the howl of the wind, all thoughts of paddling this chunk of coast were soon erased from our minds.



Portage road to Williamsport

To Glimpse the Ocean

It was just a peek at the ocean. Just the smallest sliver of a stormy sea we hadn’t been on since Knik Arm. But in this weather, it was all we were going to get.

Two days earlier, orange highway signs had warned us against winter travel on the snow-covered portage road between Lake Iliamna and Cook Inlet. Heavy snowfall. Extreme cold. Tell someone where you are going and when you expect to return. As if to make the point more clear, the wind had tossed the signs off the road, where they lay askew, displaying their message to the skies.



Pass above Williamsport

A cold spell on Lake Iliamna sent freezing drainage winds pouring through the passes, funneling down the valleys, and ripping out of the ocean bays. Packrafts stowed away, we kept our feet firmly on shore, walking gravel beaches rimed with wind-sculpted sea ice. We almost went back the way we came. Instead, we traveled just a few miles of coast to the next small bay, where another pass would return us to lake country.

Invisible Lines

We’d reached the ocean on a summer portage road. Sometimes invisible under snow, sometimes a gap in the brush, and sometimes marked by the white-frosted hulks of abandoned cars and boats. Where we crossed back over, the map marked a long-gone trail from the long-gone site of Dutton. And all the way from the drill rigs to the coast, we were paralleling a line marked only on the maps of the Pebble Partnership.



Iliamna Bay

One of the main reasons we’d made this strange zig-zagging return to Cook Inlet was to follow the proposed road route from the proposed Pebble Mine. But how do you ground truth an invisible, unfixed line that follows a route totally impractical for a brush-shy skier? We left the forest to ski on the smooth snowy lake, content for now to visit the villages in the area and the general region.

Winter in Spring



Ice on Iliamna Bay

Wind whipped at the puffy sleeves of Hig’s coat as he slowly rotated on the peak, clicking away with the camera. I looked down at the intricate shapes of frozen lakes – Iliamna, Kokhanok, Copper. We could see a tiny blue triangle of the Pacific Ocean, a corner of Mt. Douglas… Spruce trees were scattered like sparse decorations on the hills and gullies around us, descending into forests as they approached Lake Iliamna. Huge flakes of frost sparkled under every bush. The warm sun was winning the battle with the chill of the wind, and we smeared sunblock (a substance we’d not used in many months) on our exposed noses and cheeks.



A peek at the ocean

The long light, the bright sun, the beautiful snow for skiing… I might feel differently when we reach the realm of slush and breakup. But for now? I’m convinced that winter trips are best in the spring.

Kokhanok

In 2001, we were almost here in Kokhanok village. And I’m sorry we missed it. We had a great day at the Kokhanok school, and gave an impromptu slide show presentation before last night’s bingo game – meeting the adults in town. I even won $50 at bingo! We’re delaying our departure for half a day to attend a meeting of the Alaska Peninsula Corporation - listening to presentations by Pebble representatives and Full Metal Minerals. Next, we’re off on another zig-zag through beautiful country, to King Salmon and Bristol Bay.


Above Kokhanok Lake





Busted ski boots (again)


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