Glacier Bay, Part One

Correction from the last blog;  Whitehorse is NOT in British Columbia.  I know that and I apologize to everyone in the Yukon Territory and British Columbia.

I have four words to Glacier Bay National Park:  wet, magnificent,  enormous -- in that order. 

WET:  We had one sunny day out of seven.  But what can we say?  We’re in Southeast.  As one mom on the dock in Hoonah told her daughter, There is no bad weather.  Just the wrong clothing.  We had the appropriate clothing and it  all hung out (literally) in the pilot house to dry. On our tour of the Park on the Baranof Wind, Randy, the Park Naturalist, apologetically told us it was the wettest day he had seen in his six summers in the Park.  BUT it was not the worst visibility.  We could see the sides of the fiords....most of the time.

We didn’t’ see him land or take off.  He was just sitting there in the rain and berggie bits.

Ghost ship.

Are we cold?  Not so much.  Wet?  You bethca’

MAGNIFICENT:  We visited five glaciers and saw others carving their way down their mountains.   We saw ice bergs and a glacier calving.  We saw moose and seals and sea lions and birds and bears and wolves(!) and whales.  We saw clouds protecting the mountains and then parting into wispy strands to show us rocks and snow-covered peaks and myriad shades of green and gray.  We saw brown glacier-melt water and bright Caribbean-blue water. 

 

Margerie Glacier was the first glacier we visited, and, I thought, the most impressive: tall (250 feet above sea level, 50-100 feet below) and pretty.   And she is stable, neither receding  or advancing.  I think she knew we were watching, ohhing and ahhing when she calved and silently taking in her colors and contours.  

Grand Pacific Glacier, adjacent to Margerie.  His face is very dirty; at first, I thought he was a huge bank of dirt.   He is the biggest glacier we visited:  2 miles wide and 35 miles long.  And he has dual citizenship. The face is only a few miles (25?) inside the US boarder. Someday he will be a Canadian Citizen (BC). Yes, there will be a quiz at the end of the blog.  Open computer.

Lamplugh Glacier, our third glacier on the Baranof Wind tour.  Each glacier does have it’s own personality.  I like Lamplugh’s cave and wondered how long it will be before it’s ceiling becomes berggie bits..

ENORMOUS:   Although we traveled each day, we only covered a fraction of the Park.  Twenty-five pleasure boats are allowed in the Park at a time; we rarely saw any of them.  I was glad we had company on Greywolf.  In the Inside Passage, we have gone for days without seeing another boat, and certainly being the only boat is an anchorage is not unusual, but Glacier Bay FELT big.  

We talked with several cruisers who always take their Glacier Bay guests on a tour of the Park on the Baranof Wind.  Since the Park is so large, the tour gives a good overview in a short (eight hour) period of time.  We knew that the tour boat could get closer to the glaciers through the berggie bits and would certainly exceed Greywolf’s leisurely pace.  We signed up.

Baranof Wind note:  Approaching Ketchikan three weeks later, I was talking on the phone with my sister and mentioned that one of the smaller (700 feet) cruse ships, the Vonderdam, ahead of us was not getting any respect in Tongas Narrows and was on the VHF radio for the third time to ask another vessel what its intentions were.

Are you planning to continue to cross in front of me?

That’s my plan.

Then I suggest you speed up.

Good idea.

Oh!  Joani said.  That’s the boat that transferred the passengers off a tour boat in Glacier Bay.

It seems Captain Bob was trying to get close to shore to give the passengers a good view of a brown bear.  Bummer.  Those skippers are under pressure to give the customers a good experience.  

Numbers to validate ENORMOUS:  Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve’s 3.3 million acres is part of a 24 million acre UNESCO designated World Heritage Site, one of the largest protected natural areas in the world.  Looking at a map of the Heritage Site, you can see that it includes Canadian and US territory.  You can also see a little white clump of land boarding the Gulf that is not part of the Heritage Site.  A Wall-Mart?  Who held out, refusing to ceed control to UNESCO?  The Tongas National Forest. Really?  They couldn’t spare that chunk of land? Maybe there is more to the story.

The Park staff has a strict protocol for visiting boaters.  You contact the Park on the VHF radio before crossing the boundary. You stay one mile off shore (whale protection) near the entrance.  You proceed at less than 13 knots (why 13 and not 12 or 14???) in Bartlett Cove.  You make a 90 degree turn to the Park dock.  You then attend an orientation session where you are informed about the other Park rules.  Everything is designed to keep the impact on the wildlife at  minimum.  The off-limits areas are constantly being revised as animal populations move.

As soon as we tied up at Bartlett Cove, the only dock in the Park, Allie launched herself off the boat as she always does, and landed in the water between the boat and the dock.  I didn’t realize that I had her retractable leash in the lock position and had only given her enough rope to hang herself.  Knut, the skipper of a Salty Dawg, a Nordic Tug we had met in Hoonah, had taken our lines as we tied up.  He now took our dog’s harness and hauled her out.  She was so excited to be be on a dock, we didn’t even bother to dry her off.  She attended the orientation session, totally approving of the brand of dog treats offered.  She didn’t know that Bartlett Cove would be her last opportunity to touch land for a week.  Dogs are not allowed on shore in other parts of the Park.

Jolie and Bob’s Alaska Airlines plane landed at Gustavus, ten miles away and they stepped out of the taxi in Summer Clothing.  

Seattle: 2:30 PM, 95 degrees.  Sun. 

Gustavus, 4:40 PM 55 degrees. Rain.  

Luggage and backpacks spewed out their contents which were stowed in the guest stateroom A.K.A. walk-in closet.  

Vessels can only stay at the Bartlett Cove dock for three hours; Greywolf found herself a comfy spot to anchor.  

We then went through a circus of launching Pup.  Having our daughter on board apparently reminded us of how old we are.  We couldn’t get the correct lines loosened and made off.  As these two old people stared up into the rain at the lines, booms, mast, and electric motors saying, “How have we done this in the past???”, I know that Jolie was ready to have the Coast Guard confiscate the boat and put us in The Home.

Monday morning we donned rain gear and life jackets and piled into Pup, headed for the Baranof Wind  AND our free souvenir mug!

Our Naturalist, Randy, had wonderful information about the Park and the animals.  I wish I could remember it...  

This covers our first day.  I thought I’d get the entire adventure in this blog, but since I have difficulty being concise and since we have to leave at oh’dark hundred for Grenville Channel (We’re in Prince Rupert, BRITISH COLUMBIA.), I’m going to send the second installment when we next have internet.

Hightailing It (ha!) to Juneau and on to Hoonah

We woke up to rain the day after our magical bear/whale encounter with the knowledge that we needed to get Mr. Honda to a clinic.   We were scheduled to meet Jolie and Bob, a friend from New Hampshire, at Glacier Bay National Park the following Sunday.  We considered the option of not getting Mr. Honda fixed.  Jolie and Bob are both firefighters; they could row Pup for us.... We got out the planning chart.

 There are not many outboard motor repair shops in Chatham Strait. There are not many outboard motor repair shops in all of Southeast.  Angoon, population 450, is the closest village.  Northwest Boat Travel told us that part of Angoon’s history includes the 1862 Angoon Bombardment when the USS Corwin destroyed the village.  This attack resulted when a Tlingit shaman was accidentally killed by a whaling vessel’s misfire.  As was customary, the Village demanded 200 blankets as payment for the dead man’s family.  Taken as a threat, the bombardment was the response.  In 1973, the Federal Government agreed to an out-of-court settlement for the bombardment.

The only cruising boat couple we talked to who had been to Angoon stayed at a fishing lodge.  We would not be going to Angoon.  We would be going to Juneau.

To get to Juneau, we had to go around Admiralty Island, one of the ABC islands:  Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof.  Going up the west side was shorter, but the possible anchorages were in the wrong place, making it a three-day trip.  We opted for the slightly longer east side and two days.  That would put us in Auke Bay Monday evening.

Reluctantly leaving Red Bluff Bay, we entered an unexplained area of cell reception and called Julie on BI for HELP!  She searched the internet and gave us names and numbers of possible repair facilities in Juneau

Monday found us searching for cell service and Honda rep.  We found both (One number turned out to be a Volvo mechanic; the internet sometimes picks up on obscure search words.)  and secured a promise of a Tuesday appointment as well as the only Honda impeller in Juneau.  The impeller had been ordered for an other customer, but he was willing to wait.  Thank you, unknown Honda owner!

Tuesday, found us calling You Name It Delivery Service from Auke Bay, north of Juneau. 

Do you do medical transport? 

We needed two strong men and a truck to transport Mr. Honda.  We got one strong man and one strong Crazy Cowboy who had just moved to Juneau from Arizona and appeared to be high on something not legal, even in Alaska.   Akita, the polite young man who advertised You Name It must have been desperate to find a helper.  We trussed Mr. Honda up in his traveling harness and lowed him over the side into the waiting cart.  It sounds easy, but Mr. Honda becomes woozy anytime his feet are above his head.  We weren’t sure if Akita could keep the Crazy Cowboy (who wanted to HELP) in line, but the move went well.  

Akita is the man with the dark hat, trying to keep  Crazy Cowboy's
hands off the dock cart.

We paid Akita half of the agreed-upon price, (the remainder to be paid when Mr. Honda reappeared) and our outboard left the parking lot, locked in the trunk of Akita’s car, like a kidnap victim.  Doug was not at all sure we would ever see it again.

What to do while we waited?  Go shopping!  We rented a car for the afternoon.  The car rental agency used to be called Rent-a-Dent, but is now Juneau Car Rental. Too bad.  We have explored Juneau before, but missed seeing The Alaska Brewing Company, which we were told is “right next to Costco”.  Everything that is not along Gastineau Channel where, the cruise ships tie up, is “right next to Costco” including Southeast Power Sports (the repair sho), which is directly across the street from the Great Alaskan Brewery Company.  We visited both.

Mr. Honda was already on a stand, waiting to go home, when we went into the shop.  He did not have a burned-up impeller.  His pee tube was clogged.  Ouch. We paid his bill and told him Akita would be back to get time in the morning. As we left, he was happily swapping stories with the other Hondas.

Our visit to the Alaskan Brewing Company was much less expensive.  We loved their story.  A husband and wife started the company in the late ’80’s right after the only brewery in all of Alaska went broke.  Investors were hard to come by, but they found 86 individuals willing to give them various amounts of money.  During the first year, they couldn’t afford to pay people to pack the cartons for shipping, and advertised for volunteers. With free beer as a “thank you gift”, (a large percentage of the bottles were filled to the incorrect level with their old Coca-Cola bottling machine) they were never short of free labor.  Unfortunately, one of the volunteers liked money more than beer and started selling his thank you gifts.  Workers were hired.

They had planned to start a small brewery, sell it after a few years, and do something else.  Alaska Brewery is now the second largest exporter in Alaska, after oil. (I don’t know where fish figure in here.)  The company is both innovative and true to its roots.

When we tied up at Auke Bay on Tuesday, two women from Bremerton saw the Bainbridge Island WA home port on our stern and stopped to chat.  One of them was 84 and told us her friend was “younger”.  Along with two other women of “similar age”, they had brought a 37 foot Nordic Tug up the Inside Passage.  Yahoo!  They were getting underway when we returned from our car trip (‘went to Costco since we were “right next door”) and I didn’t get a chance to talk with them.  The Bremerton Sun did  a feature story on them.  I’ll be looking for that!

Akita and a very different, very skookum, helper returned Thursday morning with Mr. Honda, and our outboard happily settled himself onto Pup’s stern.  Greywolf left for Hoonah, for her second of three visits this summer.  Hoonah was a half day’s travel from Glacier Bay where we would meet Jolie and Bob on Sunday evening.

Watching Mr. Honda being hoisted up to the boat deck.

We’ve lived in Washington a long time.  Does anyone know where Eltopia is?

In Hoonah, we visited a carving shed where an exhibit to be erected in Glacier Bay in 2015, is being created;  the Hoonah Indian Association and National Park Service are working together to construct a replica Tlingit clan house.  In 1996, a plan began to provide the Huna Tlingit with the first permanent clan house in their homeland since their villages were destroyed by an advancing glacier over 250 years ago. I have heard rumblings that the idea was at first resisted (g’ment agencies don’t like ideas that are not their own), but now the clan house is underway.

“Master carver Gordon Greenwald used a geographic motif in the 16x32 foot design. With crests and iconic symbols in relative geographic positions, the screen depicts the stories of the four Glacier Bay clans and their deep connection to their Glacier Bay homeland. Once completed, the structure will serve as an interpretive center where visitors can learn about Tlingit culture and a place where Tlingit communities and organizations can provide cultural workshops on topics such as Native art, woodworking, weaving, song and dance, healthy living, and more.”

                                                 ..... from The Fairweather, Glacier Bay’s newsletter

My camera did not like the lighting in the carving shed; everything turned out a shade of green not found in nature.  I’m sure there is a way to adjust the camera to deal with this. I’m sure I do not know what it is.  

We met Gordon, a retired shop and art teacher from Hoonah , and his assistant, at the carving shed.  The “shed” is the former auto shop for the school; it was closed a number of years ago for lack of funding so the building was available for this project.  The  completed interior house screen was on display and two of the five poles (one for each clan, and a fifth to show present-day unity) were being carved. 

Gordon explained the significance of the different animals and images and mentioned the spirit of the glaciers. He said the stories of the four clans took days to tell and he had to choose what to incorporate in the poles.  On the house screen, there is one line that goes the entire width of the thirty-two foot panel, signifying the interconnectedness of all things.

Doug and I are familiar with many on the North Cost and Alaskan animal spirits, but had not been aware that the glaciers also have a spirit.  I mentioned this later to a Park Naturalist when we were talking about the carvings.  He said that he understood that not only do the glaciers have a spirit, but that spirit no more important than the spirit in the grains of sand on the beach.  We’re learning.

*****************

Cindy, a friend on BI, had told us that her brother is a fisherman in SE. Jeff is fishing out of Hoonah this summer and we got together with him on Saturday.  Having fished Southeast for years, he knows the history of the towns and we enjoyed his stories, insight, and perspective.  

Jeff and Doug discussing the paravanes.

Jeff told us about an “end time” community that had settled at Game Creek, south of Hoonah  in the 1970’s.  The organization, that had communities in other parts of the country, believed that the end of the world must be near (although they did not know the exact year) and they needed to be separate from the ills of society when that happened.  They kept to themselves, not even talking to the people in town when they came in for supplies.  Over the years, they became more assimilated and a family from the farm now owns a very well-stocked fishing equipment store in Hoonah.  I don’t know how many people still live on the farm.

When Doug and I went to the grocery store that afternoon, he showed me a book, Wilderness Blues, with stories about people living in the area (one of my “must-read” types of books).  We bought it and discovered it covered the early history of the Game Farm written by a man who came to the Farm shortly after it was established.  Tom Bott stayed on the Farm for ten years, before moving to Hoonah with his family and fishing for a living.

Jeff’s boat

Lures on Bifrost.  They looked like they wanted their 

picture taken.

Down the dock from Bifrost, a boat owner had found another reason to eat oatmeal.

Jolie hoped to go fishing while she was in Alaska, so Doug and I bought a fishing license and some extra halibut jigs (for the ones we were sure to lose...).  Jeff loaned us a pole and marked halibut holes on our charts. He must have loaned us his Good Luck Pole.  It caught a halibut in Glacier Bay!

These girls are from Switzerland.  Their dad is Canadian, mom Swiss.  They live there in the winter and in Canada in the summer.  

Halibut abound in Port Alexander.  On Saturday night, there were seventeen boats tied to the transient moorage dock, most of them 17-28 foot go-fast boats and most of them with halibut.  The majority of the people were from Whitehorse, British Columbia.  They trailer their boats to Skagway and zip down the forty-mile long Lynn Canal to Southeast’s great halibut fishing grounds.  The fish-cleaning station on the dock had people queued up, waiting their turn to stock their coolers.  A fisherman gave Doug a ziplock bag with several pounds.

The kids were excited to be catching herring for bait for the next day.

I later talked to a local who was incensed about flagrant over-fishing by the Canadians; he said skippers routinely came in with four times their limit.  When I mentioned this later to Greywolf’s crew, we agreed that it would only take one or two boats being impounded before the Canadians would start paying attention to the rules and regs.  But this is Alaska, so the chances of that happening are slim.

One of the dogs on the dock wanted to roll in the fish.  He had to get back on his boat...

We don’t see many tidal grids on Washington any more.  I think all of the harbors in 

Southeast have at least one.

Allie was pooped after playing with kids and dogs on the dock.

Doesn’t he look like a person to you??? 

 (This was carved by Mother Nature.) Then I looked in his mouth......

Greywolf got underway on Sunday, headed for Bartlett Cove in Glacier Bay and her first-ever opportunity to be a hostess to Guests At Sea.  Forty feet was about to become even smaller.