Pissed-Off Loons and Porcupine Renovations

            It’s the middle of June, only a week until the solstice, and we are still running our main glacier hiking trip as a snowshoeing outing.    After many hours of shoveling, we’ve gotten parts of our nature trail whipped into shape, but most of the mile-long trail out to Pedersen Glacier is still under two to four feet of snow.   We’re more or less creating an ad hoc snowshoe trail out of some snow-covered creek drainages.   I went out a few days ago with some loppers and a hand saw to take down some of the alders that have been springing up near the snowshoe route.   Not springing up as in growing really fast, but springing up as in, the snow-flattened branches are melting out of the snow and suddenly leaping up a couple of feet as the weight of the snow is melting off.   The snowshoeing has proven quite popular with the guests, I think because it’s such a novel thing to be doing in summer.   Plus, standing in front of a glacier wearing snowshoes makes for a neat family Christmas card photo.   

            Eventually, however, the snowshoe trail is going to melt out, which will be good news, and also bad news.   I am anticipating a bleak period where the snow is too slushy and half-melted to run snowshoeing trips, but our hiking trails still have enough snow on them to be impassable.   A few days ago, I went out to scout a new snow-free route to Pedersen Glacier, by walking along a tidally-influenced channel during a low tide.   (The route looks good, but at high tide we start to lose the beach we walk on.)   Paddling back in a kayak, I heard a rustle off in the bushes, and stopped paddling, trying to see if there was a bear hanging around in the alders.   Two seconds later, a river otter jumped into the water in front of the kayak, close enough that if I had still been moving forward, the otter would have face planted onto the bow of my boat.    He obviously hadn’t seen me before he jumped in – but the other half dozen river otters behind him did see me, and were scrambling back up the bank to get further away from my boat.    Even though the otters didn’t want to get in the water with my kayak so close, they weren’t acting particularly afraid of me, either.   Another lodge staff member was out paddling and had brought a camera; after I called him over, he got some great pictures of the otters peering down at us from the top of the embankment.    In fact, the otters seemed comfortable enough with our proximity that I radioed another guide who brought her canoe tour over to take a look at the otters.   Thankfully, the otters were still in sight after the canoe arrived, although they had moved further into the alders.   There were no great photographic opportunities, but all of the guests got to see them scrambling around in the bushes.   (The rest of the evening, the guests were all showing me their pictures of otter noses poking our from the greenery.)   This was a great sighting – not only were there a lot of otters all together, but it’s actually rare for us to see river otters on tours.   They’re around, but they tend to not be as visible as the seals, who frequently follow our boats around on tours.  So, the guests were totally right to be proud of their photos – very few guests actually see river otters here, and usually not so close.   

           

            The Red-Throated Loons are back on the Pedersen moraine, although the pond where they’ve bred for the last five years still hasn’t melted out.   Most days I can hear the loons flying over the pond, always making their ‘quack quack quack’ flight call.   They’ll loop over the frozen pond, ascertain that it is still frozen, then bank left and land in the open water in the upper lagoon.   Once they’re on the water, you can hear them calling back and forth and complaining to each other about their lack of a pond.   The loons must be even more fed up with the late spring than the lodge staff are.   For the loons, having that pond frozen is like them being locked out of their house.   It almost sounds like their ‘quack quack quack’ call is another word that contains the letters u, c, and k.   

            It’s been a rough winter for the birds; we keep finding dead ones melting out of the snow on the beaches and around camp.   There were a bunch of dead gulls on the beach, dead crows in the woods, and dead murres on the Aialik moraine.    And a few days ago, a bird melted out of the snow next to the generator shed, which is either another dead murre, or one of the juvenile red-throated loon chicks from last summer.   I’m sort of hoping it’s a murre (it’s manky enough that the subtle variations of plumage are lost, but it’s a large, heavy-boned bird, brown on top and white on the breast, with webbed feet set back pretty far on the body, and a dark, pointed bill).  

             Coming back to the lodge from a boat trip to the glacier, my guests and I had a North by Northwest sort of encounter with a red and white Supercub that was buzzing us on the beach.   I was driving our ATV-style golf cart back along the Lodge’s beach road with a guest, A, and three other staff.   Two minutes down the road, I screeched the ATV to a halt because it looked like the plane might actually be trying to touch down on the road in front of me.   A said that she thought the plane was trying to make an emergency landing on the beach.   I found out later that A is a pilot – this lends some credence to the notion that this plane was flying much closer to the ground than is normal.   Just after disappearing out of sight over the rim of the beach, the plane pulled up and went into a steep ascent, heading back to Seward over the Icefield.    So, no one had to run through any cornfields to escape the bad guys, but the whole event was a little alarming.   If I had been thinking, I would have tried to get the numbers off of the tail, and one of the managers could have looked him up and had a little chat about being respectful of other people’s immediate airspace.

            I am happy to report that several humpback whales have remained in the bay, and our kayak tours have been seeing them, from a distance where the guests are impressed and get good pictures, but far enough away that none of them are fearing for their lives.   In other wildlife news, the camp porcupine is searching for a new home, and has apparently singled out my triplex room as a potential den.   This is the guy who was living in the maintenance shed over the winter, and chewed up the seats on our ATVs.   With the maintenance shed now back to being a hive of activity, and with the porcupine’s old den (under the generator shed) being ground zero for a construction project to expand the lodge drying room, the porcupine has apparently decided it’s time to look elsewhere for a nice, quiet building to chew up.   I’ve woken up in the morning a few times to porcupine scat on my steps, and chew marks on the door frame.   (This is not the first time he has done this.   Two years ago, this same porcupine chewed on our door so loudly that my roommate and I were briefly convinced that a bear was trying to break in to our room.)   I don’t think he has much of a chance of breaking down the door, but I’ve been careful about making sure that the door latches at night.   Otherwise, I’m convinced that he would stroll right in and start nesting in my bookshelf.  

Shoveling out the Snow

            It is a month since my last blog update, and I am now settled back into my summer home at the Iceberg Lodge.   Since leaving New Zealand, I spent five days in West Virginia visiting family, and a hectic week doing pre-season training all over the Kenai Peninsula and the Mat-Su Valley, getting my sea kayak and wilderness first responder certifications renewed before my guiding job started.   My first week back in the US, I was in seven different airports and four different time zones; it was a little exhausting.   

            (The flight attendant on the flight up to Anchorage asked us to kindly turn off and stow our personable electronic devices in preparation for landing.   Does that mean that if my electronic device is introverted and unfriendly, I can keep it turned on for longer?)

            Once I got down to the Kenai Peninsula, I was  able to see for myself the epic, record-breaking amounts of snow that have been blanketing the state of Alaska over the winter.   On May 5, my Subaru was still buried in snow up to the level of the hood.   It took three hours, four people, and a plow truck to extricate my car, (including the time it took to dig out the plow truck when it got stuck trying to clear a path to my car).   There are a bunch of new scratches on the hood from the snow shovel, and the roof is now dented from the weight of the snow, but it’s running fine.   In other words, it’s all ready to sit in the Seward seafood truck lot for another four months until the end of my guiding contract.   

            The first part of my Alaska training week was three days of kayak training on Kenai Lake, getting dumped out of kayaks and practicing how to get back in them, and how to get other people back into them.   It went OK, but I am always a little worried that when we practice this stuff, we are practicing on other kayak guides, who are sort of ideal victims – reasonably athletic and coordinated, who know how to balance on the boats when we’re clambering around them trying to get people back in their seats.   Also, they do as they’re told – something that actual, panicked, cold guests may not do.   It was very cold, even though we were wearing drysuits, and it was sort of a constant battle to stay warm, and to stay focused on what we were doing, and try to ignore the fact that I couldn’t feel my toes.   At the end of the day, my hands looked like they had been beaten with meat tenderizers – all red and swollen.   The day after the boat training finished, I woke up at 4AM to drive up to Palmer for my medical recertification.   It was snowing on both of the high passes, and it was cold enough that the snow was sticking to the road – I was passing snowplows on Turnagin Pass, which was a little surreal for May.   

            Fortunately, there was no snow in Palmer itself, which was good since I was camping out.   Unfortunately, the campsite was very exposed to the wind, and I went to sleep every night to the sound of my rainfly flapping against the tent wall like some sort of deranged bird.   It felt like the tent was going to carry me to Oz.   

            After the kayak training, the medical recertification actually felt like a break, since although we were outside quite a bit, we were dry the whole time, so I was pretty happy.

            Two days later I left for the Iceberg Lodge.   Like the rest of Alaska, the Lodge got slammed with snow this winter.   I had always wanted to see the Lodge in winter, as I have never been out to Aialik Bay any later than September, or any earlier than April.   Now having seen the Lodge covered in eight feet of snow, I feel that my winter bay-visiting ambitions been satisfied.     A lot of the first week was spent digging out things – water tanks, cabins, boardwalks, and access to maintenance buildings.   It’s amazing how long it takes to set up our essential systems (power, water, septic, kitchens) when everything you want to work on has to first be dug out of eight feet of snow.   The weight of the snow actually crumpled a few of our boardwalks, and messed up the siding on a couple of window frames, but, fortunately, there was no structural damage to any of the buildings themselves.    Also, part of our septic system froze.   It was a challenge to figure ut where some of the stuff we needed to dig up eve was.   When we first arrived at the lodge site, we hadn’t finished plowing the road out to the beach, so we loaded up our gear and groceries into sleds and snowshoed in, dragging the sleds behind us, kind of like those pictures of ill-fated Antarctic expeditions back in the 1900s.   Our maintenance team was snowblowing the road with a Bobcat from about 4am until 2am, working in shifts.   Thank goodness for lots of Alaskan summer daylight…    

Snowblowing the boardwalks in front of the lodge

          Currently, we can drive vehicles out to the boat directly – no snowshoeing involved – although we are detouring onto the beach for the last half-mile, which we normally don’t do.   Depending on where the tide is, there isn’t always a lot of room to turn the ATVs around on the beach – and one of the ATVs doesn’t go in reverse anymore, so once you start turning, you are kind of committed.    Turning them always involves an unsettling moment where I am driving downhill directly towards the ocean, but so far, no one’s drowned any equipment.   We have been breaking equipment left and right (mostly snowblowers), but our maintenance guys have so far been able to resuscitate them in a day or two.    Also, the snowpack has been melting out – the little snag tree in front of the lodge is slowly being uncovered, and judging by how much is visible now compared to last week, I estimate we’ve lost about two feet of height since we got here.   When we were first plowing the road, the snow canyon was so high that you couldn’t see over it – there were concerns that an ATV could inadvertently run into a pedestrian – or worse, a bear – because you couldn’t see around any of the bends.   It’s also nice to be able to see out the windows, instead of facing an imposing wall of snow.   

            Now that we’ve cleared the road and the boardwalks, the bears, recognizing a good thing when they see it, are back to wandering through camp.   There’s not a lot of food out there for them right now.   We’ve had one bear on a nearby beach, who seems to be methodically shearing off every single sprouting plant on the entire shore, probably for lack of anything else he can get to.  Also, the half-tame porcupine who lives under our generator shed apparently moved into the vehicle garage over the winter, and chewed up the upholstery on our ATV seats.   D, one of the maintenance guys, has declared that the porcupine’s days are numbered; the rest of the staff have been trying to keep the porcupine away from D, as the critter is probably the closest thing we have to a pet out here.    One staff member successfully kept the porcupine hidden under a workbench for about half an hour before D left and the porcupine could be safely shooed off.   

            The company president was out here for over a week.   He flew by helicopter, and brought with him a replacement hose for a busted hydraulic on our ASV, which is possibly the fastest broken part turnaround in the history of the Iceberg Lodge.   He stayed out for a week, running the snow blower, and assessing the damage.   

            A few days later, a group of our company’s tour escorts arrived for their pre-season orientation trip.    We put them to work shoveling out some of the site – they had to shovel paths to the cabins they were staying in – and also did some training with them on how to steer our canoes.   We still have over a week before the first guests arrive, and I think we are actually on track to be ready for that deadline.   When we first got out here, it didn’t seem like we would be able to open on time.    It helps that for my particular department, all of the staff are returning, so we don’t have to spend time training anyone from scratch.   Now that the road to the beach is open, more or less, we’ve even been able to snowblow paths in the staff area, so that we can get around our half of camp without having to use snowshoes.   I even get a day off tomorrow; life is looking good.

Windy Wonderland

            The wind has been ridiculously strong for the past week.   It’s also tried to snow a couple of times, but the wind won’t let any of it accumulate, unless you have a doorway that happens to face north.   The snow seems to accumulate right there just fine.   A friend informed me that she had to shovel out her door four times in one day because the drifts kept piling up on her porch.   After spending a day at the aquarium watching the snow blow past the building, I was sure I was going to have to break out the snowblower.  

           Just to clarify, when someone says snowblower, I think of  a handheld, extension-cord-powered, outdoor gizmo – something a bit like a large hair dryer for the driveway.    Here in Alaska, snowblower is the name for the 2-stoke engine, caterpillar-treaded, snow-destroying tank that lives in the woodshed.    But when I actually fired up the snow-destroying tank, not enough of the snow had actually stuck to the ground for the snowblower to do any good.   (No idea where all the snow ended up – probably it’s all piling into drifts on Julie’s porch.)

            We don't have any new snow, but the wind is more than making up for it.   Standing in the aquarium, in some places you can literally feel the building vibrating with some of the gusts.   And when it did snow, it felt like the outdoor exhibits had turned into seal-themed snow globes.   We had to keep the doors to the outside areas locked, because otherwise the wind kept blowing them open.   Not surprisingly, very few of the visitors were interested in going outside anyway, since the wind chill was flirting with 20 below.   So I kept myself busy manning the touch tank, and watching Tongass the seal chasing the surface waves in his tank.   (I didn’t know you could get surface chop in a thirty-foot pool.   The seals apparently think it’s pretty cool.)

            A few nights ago, I got to go on my first Alaskan epic adventure of this winter season.   (Not counting the trip to pick up my car, which the auto transport elves finally delivered to Anchorage last week.   Although if you want to talk about levels of frustration, incompetence, and misinformation, epic would be a very appropriate word.   I’m just glad the car’s here, and the battery still starts.   Now I just need to get the wiper fluid to stop freezing to my windshield, and I will be all set.)

            I went out with a local snowshoeing group on Saturday night, to snowshoe under the full moon at the Mile 12 ski area.   There wasn’t actually a full moon (or there was, but it didn’t show up until after we got home) but the starlight more than made up for it.   Alaska is one of those places where, as long as the sky is clear, something up there will be glowing, regardless of what time of day it is.   On this particular evening, the stars were out in force.   And fortunately, where we were there was at least a little protection from the wind.

            Our intrepid leader, Sam, took us up a woody hillside trail that came out at a series of lakes and meadows all strung out on a bluff somewhere west of the highway.    The view of the stars on the lake was immense, and the snow was reflecting the light back, so you could see really, really well with just the snow and the starlight.   A few more prepared individuals had brought headlamps, but once we got out of the trees, we mostly turned them off.   Plus there were three dogs with us, all equipped with blinking LED collars, running around the meadow like a bunch of hyperactive UFOs.   At the top of the bluff, we intersected a power line cut, which we followed back down the hill to the ski area.   It felt really nice to go downhill through a big, wide corridor like that, especially since from the foliage sticking up through the snow, the corridor is probably chock full of devil’s club during the summer.   And it was too dark to really see the power lines very much, which helped maintain the illusion that we were in the middle of the woods.

            The hike was definitely more of a workout than I had planned on, and in that sense it was good that I didn’t seriously layer up, because I was working up a sweat the whole time we were out.   I was using borrowed snowshoes, and while I tried them out in the yard before jumping in the car, the bindings, which didn’t inspire a lot of confidence to begin with, ended up in a fubar-esque condition after maybe a quarter mile.   Fortunately, Sam pulled out some of the MacGyver-like Alaskan ingenuity that all long-time residents seem to have, and improvised a binding by taking the straps from the nonfunctional binding and tying them in fancy knots around my ankle.   I’m not sure what exactly he did, but all I can say is that it worked really, really well, and was undoubtedly what allowed me to finish the hike.   

            Now my question is, where do they keep this Alaskan ingenuity, and how do I sign up to get some?   It didn’t show up in my PO Box, or with my state ID.   Maybe I’ll get it with the Alaska permanent fund check.