Things They Don't Tell You About Winter in Alaska

You already knew about the months of limited daylight, the sub-zero windchill, and the 8-10 feet of snow.   Here's what they don't tell you about winter in the 49th state. 

Resurrection Bay, Seward

• If a piece of metal gets cold enough, your hand will stick to it.   Kind of like the kid licking the flagpole, except you don't even need to use a particularly wet body part - your index finger and an iced-over gate latch will demonstrate this effect just fine.

• In the winter, you will give electric shocks of static electricity to everything you touch.   Doorknobs, pets, children, iPods…   If it can carry a charge, you will give it one.   Constantly.

• Most city streets get temporary winter-season dividers between the oncoming lanes, in the form of giant piles of snow that have been plowed into the middle of the road and left until spring.   Intersections between streets are usually left clear - but don't plan on being able to turn left into someone's driveway, because that side of the street is probably barricaded.  

• Your car needs winter gear, too - except gear for the car is more expensive.   Getting a set of studded tires, an engine block heater, and an auto-start will set you back about $600 or so.   It makes that Patagonia 800-fill goose down parka with the detachable faux-fur hood look cheap in comparison

• Christmas is sot of a big deal in Alaska, partially because in the middle of a cold, dark time of the year, it’s good to be able to look forward to a time where a family can gather together and enjoy a respite from the daily challenges of winter.   For most Alaskans, this means a vacation to Hawaii.   For the rest of us, Christmas dinner will do in a pinch.  

• The dead animals get festive - because nothing says ‘Alaskan holidays’ quite like a string of Christmas lights decorating a caribou head.

• The weather becomes even more a topic of conversation than it does in the summer, perhaps because there isn’t much else going on.   I’ve found that Alaskans are more creative in discussing the weather than people in the Lower 48.   For one, the weather here is a little more intense – we routinely measure snow in feet, not inches, and wind speed in Beaufort storm scales, not miles per hour.   Another popular climactic pastime is comparing the current weather to whatever the weather was doing at the same time last year, or the year before.   (If nothing else, you can always say that no matter how bad the weather is this week/month/season, it is better than the same week/month/season in 2008.)

• A subset about talking about weather is talking about earthquakes – how long it lasted, what shook and for how long, under what sort of object you took shelter, and what you did immediately afterwards to make sure a tsunami wasn’t on its way to obliterate coastal towns in your area.

• When traveling outside of the state, most non-Alaskans you meet will be fascinated by your local weather - even if it isn’t all that fascinating to you.   Prepare for these inevitable conversations by making sure that you know the current average temperature, hours of daylight, and inches/feet of snow on the ground for your area before leaving the state.   People you have never met before will, on learning you are from Alaska, want to know your local weather, and how many feet of snow is sitting in your yard.   They will want to know how you personally can stand living somewhere that dark and cold.    If you would rather not spend your entire vacation discussing seasonal affective disorder, consider just telling people you live ‘out west’.   This is a good strategy for dodging weather conversations entirely.   No one wants to hear about your weather if there is even a remote chance that you live in southern California.

Fall Update

            Seward has gotten its first official snowfall of the winter, and in a bit of impeccable timing, I managed to be out of town when it happened.   I am currently in West Virginia, visiting family there for a few weeks, before returning to Alaska for six months of winter.   Perhaps this is only fair, since I missed out on winter entirely last year (I was in New Zealand, so I got three summers back-to-back).   

Iceberg Lodge girls

            The Iceberg Lodge is all closed up for the winter, and ready to slumber under the snow until next spring.   I spent the end of September helping a local dog kennel clean up after a flood.   With this particular flood, it wasn’t so much the water we were cleaning up as it was the gravel and rocks that the flood left behind.   The stream that flooded contained a lot of glacier debris – silt and rocks, mostly.   And a lot of those silt and rocks got washed into the buildings from the force of the water.   I spent a lot of time shoveling rocks out of the building, with the help of a few small bulldozers.   Some of the rocks were pretty large – I found it amazing that water could move something that I had trouble lifting with a shovel.   Sometimes, the work felt a little bit like excavating Pompeii.   Or what might happen if you pissed off someone who works at the Metco gravel lot. 

            Fortunately, my car survived the flood just fine – we were concerned about our cars when we saw on the internet flooded-out pictures of the building across the street from where we had parked them.   Fortunately, the water didn’t get high enough to damage anything.   

            Comparatively speaking, the Iceberg Lodge did very well during the flood because the water didn’t actually threaten any of our buildings.  (A few of them leak, but we've known that for a while.)   And the plant life around here can deal with the weather just fine.   Our forest’s moss carpet will take the worst rain and ask for more.  We have puddles and mud holes on our roads, (basically, wherever we have build and cleared things), but the forest itself never looks like it’s gone through any hard rain.   The moss just soaks it in like a green organic sponge.   The little pools in the forest get bigger, and creeks get wilder, but the plants still seem pretty happy.   But I think the rain must be rough on the bears.   I didn’t see any bears at all during the Iceberg Lodge's closedown period, which is unusual.  However, we did get a bear ceremonially seeing us off at the Point on the day we left, as well as the day-of-departure rainbow.   Both of these are becoming Iceberg Lodge traditions.

A rainbow over Pedersen Lagoon

            The other interesting thing about the shutdown week is that there has been a huge increase in the amount of trash that washed up on our beach.   I think the tsunami debris is beginning to arrive in a big way; if this continue over the winter, the beaches are going to be pretty coated by the time we get back in the spring.   Mostly, the trash on the beaches is a big pain to clean up, but there is also always the opportunity to find cool stuff mixed in with all the Styrofoam flecks and empty plastic bottles.   I found a few small fishing buoys this year, and every year I find at least two ball caps over the course of the summer.   The prize for the best sea debris this year definitely goes to our maintenance guy, who found a bag of Zodiac emergency gear carefully tied off to a tree, which had been uprooted and washed up on our beach.   There was a flashlight in there, with extra batteries, pumps, blige spones, and some things that looked like part of a boat repair kit.   We hope that whoever lost their gear, they didn’t actually need any of it. 

Misapprehensions About Bears

            Last week I ended up going to Seward to get a tooth looked at, which fortunately turned out to be fine.   I was in town for just over 16 hours, and went back to the Iceberg Lodge a day early because of the atrocious marine forecast for the following day.   The night I got back, the wind started blowing hard enough that the lodge’s broken roof cap (damaged by the heavy snowfall earlier in the season)  was flapping in the wind like a thunder sheet, lending a dinner theatre ‘dark and stormy night’ sort of atmosphere to the evening.   (At times, it also sounded like someone racking up a dozen of the world’s largest pool balls.)   Apparently, one of the maintenance men climbed up on the roof sometime after midnight and screwed down the flapping roof bit to keep it from breaking itself or anything else it was banging against.   In other news, the tarp over our kayaks is apparently shredded beyond all hope of repair, (and this was the assessment of someone who makes a habit of keeping around a lot of ratty, useless tarps).   I haven’t looked at it myself, since the beach was something of a no-go zone for most of the morning, due to the high winds.   There were sustained winds in the 40 mph range, gusting up to 70mph, which made it difficult even to walk around.   Also, those winds speeds are enough to turn ordinary beach sand into weaponized projectiles; the guys who were out scouting the beach were wearing ski goggles.   Fortunately, the wind died down enough for the boat to make it out here the following day, although they had a very rough ride coming out.   Now we have only 19 guests in camp, down from 38 the previous day.   That day was the last full house of the season, and it would have been very Iceberg-Lodge-typical if the last full house stretched into another night because we couldn’t get the departing guests back to Seward.   Sometimes, it seems like this place enjoys finding ways to screw us over – massive snow, epic rain, week-long gales, marauding wildlife, exploding septic systems, etc…. 

            Now that we’re back to very small numbers of guests, my job has gotten a whole lot easier.    I’ve had two great days of guiding, despite the fact that it’s been raining constantly.   Such as, nature hikes with only two people, and kayak trips with only one guest.   One of the guests was from Kenya, and a birder, who was talking about lions walking through his property last month…    Later that afternoon, I went out with just one guest, M, who is also in the tourism business.   We took a double kayak to the upper lagoon, and paddled as much open water as we could find.   The icebergs are close to being as melted out as they are going to get this season, so we were able to explore in a lot of nooks and corners.   There were also 50-60 seals in the water, and it was a really fun trip.  

            Then today, M and I went to Aialik Glacier, again as a solo trip.   It was a great trip for several reasons – trips with only one guest in no way resemble actual work, because all of the crowd control and group management issues magically vanish.   You just get to go out and paddle, and talk about seals, which is sort of what I do on my days off, anyway.   We were also able to get to a part of the glacier’s moraine that I haven’t been able to get to for nearly a month, thanks to a change in the glacier’s melt-water route, which has cut a new river right down the middle of our old landing beach.   (How that happened is a story worthy of its own blog post.)  Today, M and I were able to paddle around the melt-water and land on a sketchy, boulder-heavy part of the beach, which was manageable only because I only had one boat to worry about.   I dragged the kayak across the boulders and tied it off to a rock above the storm shelf.   From there, we were able to walk out along the moraine to a bluff overlooking the glacier, and up to the side of the glacier itself.   The glacier has been advancing along that side all summer, and is pushing a pile of rocks ahead of it like a bulldozer.    In June, there was a big quartz rock about thirty feet from the ice that we used as a ‘do not pass’ barrier.   That rock is now totally covered by ice.   I estimate the glacier has come forward by about 60-80 feet in the past three months.   That’s around 8 inches a day or something in that range.    The rubble pile in front of the ice is close to seven feet tall now, and it’s starting to plow through a small stand of alders, which are being slowly uprooted and buried.   It’s like watching a slow-motion bulldozer. Not having seen that section of the glacier for nearly a month makes the speed of the ice’s advance even more apparent.   Also, walking around and exploring on the moraine was good because it gave us something to do on land, as opposed to spending the whole tour sitting in a kayak, in the pouring rain.   

            Also at the Aialik moraine, we saw a calving event large enough to produce a wave high enough to prove my point about the danger of glacier-caused tsunami waves - but not high enough to actually wipe us from the face of the earth, which is nice.   (About one tour in a hundred ends up running for their lives rapidly evacuating to higher ground somewhere on the Aialik moraine.)    

            Also a bonus, there was a bear in the meadow all day today.   We saw him when we went out to set up the boats, where he appeared to vaguely pay attention to our ATVs.   Walking out with M at the beginning of our tour, the bear sat up long enough to give us a blank stare, and then lay back down even before M could take a picture.   Walking back to the lodge five hours later, he was still in the same place, grazing on grass in the rain.   Usually, guests here are afraid of bears up until the moment they actually see one.   Our bears are freakishly tolerant of people, and they spend a lot of time eating grass.   They are sort like cows, except with way better PR.   It’s hard to be mortally terrified of an animal that won’t even bother to sit up when you walk by.   Not to say that the bears aren’t dangerous, because they can be.   If you surprise a bear, or get between a bear and food, or a bear and cubs, then all bets are off.   But mostly, the bears aren’t interested in being predatory.   They’re just here for the salmon.

            The closest I’ve gotten to a bear this year was hiking a section of trail near Pedersen Glacier that we don’t normally use.   The bear heard us coming, and decided to climb up a spruce tree and wait us out.   Which was very sensible of the bear.   Unfortunately, the tree the bear picked was (a) not very tall, and (b) right next to the trail we were hiking down.   I didn’t see the bear until we were under the tree.    The bear let out a howl, probably because he thought we were deliberately going after him, and scrambled a few feet further up the trunk.   Instant chaos for about thirty seconds, as me and the line of guests behind me abruptly reverse direction and beat a hasty retreat.   We watched the bear for about two minutes from further down the trail, which was long enough for the guests to all take pictures, and for the bear to start making noises complaining about when we were going to back off and let him get out of the damn tree.    We bushwhacked through the alders for about thirty yards to detour around the bear at a safe distance.   The two young boys on the trip thought the bear encounter was the coolest thing ever, and were pestering me for bear stories for the rest of the hike.    Then back at the lodge, they were telling their very own bear story to anyone who would listen.

            The bears are one thing that makes living out here very interesting.   The bears are our neighbors, and they wander through camp like they own the place sometimes.   Also, bears are one of the big things that people from Outside associate with Alaska.   It came up a lot in New Zealand when I told people where I was from.   “Hi, my name is Mareth; I’m from Alaska.   Allow me to correct your misapprehensions about bears.”

Ermine Invasions

            My most recent tour to the Upper Lagoon was an exercise in snatching partial victory from the jaws of defeat.   On trips to the Upper Lagoon, we paddle through a tidally-influenced channel that only permits travel up to Pedersen Glacier around certain high tides.   (Usually, the channel carries the glacier’s meltwater downstream to the bay.   But on some high tides, the level of the sea rises enough that the stream actually reverses directions – instead of fresh water flowing downstream, it’s salt water flowing uphill.)   This particular tide height was only 7.6, (we like to run at 8 feet or higher), so it was sort of a marginal high tide to begin with.   Additionally, we only had two people sign up for the trip, which is a good thing in some respects (guiding trips become progressively easier the fewer clients there are), but it meant that we needed to paddle up in kayaks.   Three people (myself and the clients) are simply not enough people to effectively paddle an eight-person canoe.   Unfortunately, tours in kayaks require a lot more time at the beginning of the trip to get everyone dressed in their spray skirts and cover the safety points about the boats.   So, that was two strikes against the trip going as planned.   The third strike came in the form of one of the slowest client paddling speeds that I have yet seen this summer.    (Some beginning kayakers do not immediately make the connection that in order to propel a boat through the water, you need to actually encounter some resistance against your paddle.   Some clients get their paddle wet, and not much else.)   The combination of a marginal tide, a late start, and a slow paddling speed made an unfortunate trifecta; by the time we reached the tidal channel, it was already a half an hour past the posted high tide.   For reasons I don’t fully understand, the tides in the lagoon can be delayed up to two hours from the posted Seward tides - however, this wasn’t a high enough tide for the water to stack up like that.   By the tie we got to the channel, the current had already reversed, and was flowing downstream, opposite the way we wanted to go.   

            I pulled out my tow rope, clipped my clients’ boat onto a ten-foot tether and started paddling for all I was worth.   With the weight of the double kayak, plus the fact that the current was heading the other direction, it was definitely a workout.   We inched our way into the channel.   After a few minute, we pulled far enough ahead of a low take-out on the opposite bank where we could potentially land the kayaks on shore.   I hollered to my clients that we probably weren’t going to be able to make it much further in (mostly because I knew that I was going to run out of steam eventually, and also that I didn’t know how great a tour experience my clients would have if the whole tour was just inch-by-inch progress up the channel…)   They seemed good with the change in plan, so we turned and ferried across the channel to the opposite bank.   

            One confession: I didn’t quite know how landing two kayaks in current, and with a boat on a tow, would actually work.   I had visions of getting my kayak into shore, then having to stop paddling to get out of my boat, and subsequently being dragged back into the water by the weight of the boat I was towing.   So I asked my people to paddle hard into shore and try to beach their boats as much as they could; which they did pretty well.   There was slack on the rope as I was getting out; then I pulled their kayak further up the bank and helped them climb out.   Not nearly as dramatic as I had expected.   

            Once we were on shore, we walked about 70 yards up the bank to a  place where we could see the upper lagoon, and get views of all the grounded icebergs at the front of Pedersen Glacier.   I felt very sorry for one of the clients, who had problems with her feet, and was having trouble walking in the rubber boots.   On the plus side, since it was just the three of us, we were really able to tailor the trip around what they were interested in doing.   So we walked out to the shore, took some pictures, and walked back.   This is another reason why tours with just a few clients are wonderful; its much easier to manage unexpected situations when there are fewer people to keep track of.    

            The next day was good; it was a five-bear day.   The first bear was grazing in the meadow as we were setting up boats for our morning trips.   The second and third bears were seen distantly as we were paddling across the lagoon for the morning canoe and hiking tour.   The third and fourth bears were a double feature for the afternoon canoe trip.   

            There is one bear around the lodge that we can recognize by sight, thanks to a large brown saddle mark on his rear end.   This brown spot has earned the bear the name Cinnamon Bun.   Cinnamon Bun has occasionally been seen hanging out with another bear; we wonder if the bears are litter-mates, as they don’t seem to act much like a male/female pair.   

            Anyway, Cinnamon Bun and the other bear were both on the shore of the lagoon, vacuuming up the plantago that grows near the high-tide line.   It was very clear from watching them who was the dominant bear.   Cinnamon Bun was just mowing the grass; he didn’t seem to care what the other bear was doing.   The little bear, on the other hand, was paying very close attention to Cinnamon Bun.   Every time Cinnamon Bun moved closer, the little bear would stop eating and take a few steps further away, and stare at Cinnamon Bun for a few seconds before going back to eating.   Eventually, Cinnamon Bun started moving purposefully along the beach in the direction of the other bear; the little guy  got spooked.   He loped up the beach and disappeared into the greenery, while Cinnamon Bun continued walking along and cropping plants.

            The next day, strangely, none of our guests wanted to go on any trips in the afternoon.   This turned out to be a good thing, as the best wildlife sightings of the day all took place inside the guest cabins.   

            The guests in cabin eight had gone back to their room after lunch, and were taking a nap.    They woke up in a hurry when a squirrel jumped in bed with them.   Within the hour, ermine were reported breaking into two other cabins (apparently they’d been taking clues from the squirrels).   The ermine look like tiny brown ferrets; they might appear cute, but they are also carnivorous murderers.   One of the ermine had drug a dead vole into the cabin with it; it apparently wanted to stockpile some food in their bed.   From the refuge of some high furniture, the clients took photos with their iPad of the ermine ransacking their room.   At the bar that night, everyone was sharing pictures they’d taken of ermine and squirrels climbing bedframes, chewing gloves, and scurrying in and out of cracks in the walls.    Two of the lodge staff were kept busy for a couple of hours chasing the wildlife out of the cabins, and crawling under the buildings with cans of spray-foam insulation, trying to identify and plug up their access routes.   The lodge manager comp’ed a bottle of wine to everyone who had had their room infested, and everyone seemed pretty happy with their up-close-and-personal Alaska wildlife encounter.   

             In other animal news, the camp porcupine got into the maintenance shed last week and chewed up a tube of silicone gel.   The porcupine was seen waddling out of camp with orange goo smeared all over his face.  We suspect he was probably high as a kite on glue fumes.   The maintenance staff are now talking about trying to live-trap and relocate the porcupine to the other side of the lagoon, to save our silicone gels from further destruction, and possibly to save the porcupine from ingesting more chemicals than are good for him.   

            I saw the porcupine a few days later on the ridge; we walked behind him for about seventy-five yards taking pictures.  He knew we were behind him, but the brush was so thick that he couldn’t get off the trail, or didn’t want to bother.   Instead, he’d turn around, give us a dirty look, and waddle faster down the trail.   Eventually, he dove into the bushes, shaking his quills ominously as we passed.

Floating Zombie River Otters

            The same day that the river otter researchers were due to come to the Iceberg lodge to give a presentation on their research, we found a dead river otter floating in the lagoon.   It was floating intestines up; we went over  to it because at first I thought we were looking at the back of a seal’s head.   Turns out, not so much.   River otters are a little like big, streamlined brown ferrets; they are so adorable that they even look moderately cute when floating head-down in salt water.   My clients in the canoe were clucking and making how sad noises.   So, we looked at the dead otter, and I made the mistake of telling my clients that this was the third dead otter we’d found in the lagoon in a month, and that, coincidentally, a team of river otter researchers from the University of Wisconsin would be coming over to give a presentation on their research in just a few hours.   Immediately, a few people in the boat asked if we ought to bring the dead otter back to the lodge, so that the researchers could do an otter autopsy and try to find out why the otter had died.   I wasn’t totally sure if the otter team’s research goals included playing CSI: Aialik Bay – as my clients very obviously wanted to do - but I figured they would probably be interested in the otter.   I asked if everyone was OK with having a dead otter sitting in the back of the canoe for the rest of the tour.   Surprisingly, everyone was.   

            So we turned the canoe around, and after a few minutes of searching, resighted the otter.   Now that I knew that I had to pick the thing out of the water, it suddenly looked a lot less cute and pathetic, and a lot more dead.   But the coat seemed to be in good shape, and it seemed to be pretty much intact and un-decayed.   At least, as undecayed as a zombie floating dead river otter can look.   I maneuvered us as close to the otter as I could, which was complicated by the fact that all of the clients on the boat were looking over their shoulders to try and watch their guide do something gross in the name of science.    I reached into the water, trying not to picture what would happen if the otter suddenly woke up and sank its zombie teeth into my hand.   

            I grabbed the zombie otter by the tail and pulled.   The first thing I noticed was that a waterlogged river otter is actually quite heavy.   The second thing I noticed was the vibration as the tail vertebrae dislocated from the spine.   The third thing I noticed was that this otter was definitely a male.   I pulled, and the otter slid up the side of the canoe, its big rat-like feet dangling over the gunnel.   The otter felt even heavier.   Then the otter’s pelt started to split open along the back like someone undoing a zipper.   The smell hit us like the world’s worst port-a-pottie, and I immediately dropped the otter back into the lagoon.   The smell, unfortunately, stayed around (albeit in a much diluted form) for the rest of the canoe tour, probably because I had managed to liberally spritz my clothing with otter juice in the process of hauling him into my canoe.   I used the boat pump (normally used to pump rain water out of the canoes) to pump a few quarts of lagoon water into the boat to try and dilute the smell, which sort of worked.   The clients coped admirably – fishing him out was their idea, after all – and we finished the rest of the tour without incident.   I left one of the other guides to put my boat away, and immediately went to shower and wash my clothes.   

            The researchers were, indeed, interested that we’d found so many dead otters in such a short span of time, although they said that from what they’d seen of the otters, they all seemed to be pretty healthy.   They did not, however, seem terribly interested in haring off into the lagoon to relocate the dead otter after hearing my clients’ description of its condition.   

            One of the maintenance men, however, did go haring off into the lagoon after the otter, and returned with it floating in a five-gallon bucket.   (The trick to keeping the smell at bay is to keep them submerged at all times.   Going forward, if any guests want to bring back dead animals they find in the lagoon, I will lasso them with the canoe’s bowline and drag them behind the boat like a sea anchor.)   He plans to drop the otter into a crab pot for a few weeks, to let the crabs (and any other sea creatures with indiscriminate gustatory habits) strip the meat away from the carcass.   We’d be left with a jumble of bones which he could theoretically glue and wire back into shape, sort of like a very complicated tinkertoy project.   I would like the skull for the interpretive corner at the guide desk, which is already liberally covered with various parts and pieces of dead animals (seal and otter pelts, snail shells, urchin tests, bird feathers, and a bear skull).   Ultimately, the zombie otter stayed in the bucket for over two weeks, and every day it looked a little more like a giant floating mass of hair that someone had pulled out of a shower drain.   It disappeared from the bucket shortly before the maintenance man left to visit his wife.   I am hoping that M did not show up at home after being gone for two weeks with a decayed otter in tow…

            A few days later, I got the fright of my life when the canoe’s drain plug got knocked loose during a tour, instantly unleashing a torrent of salt water flooding into our boat.   Fortunately, we were in the mouth of Addison creek, which is a great place to have a canoe emergency because the water is only four feet deep.   Even though hearing the water rushing into the canoe was quite alarming, I also realized right off the bat that this was a situation everyone would be walking away from – since if the canoe sank out from under us, this is pretty much what we would do.   I shouted at my clients to paddle, got the boat to shore, hopped out in knee deep water and spent a few minutes wresting the drain plug back into place.   (When used correctly, the drain plugs have a lever that allows them to expand once they’ve been inserted into the draining hole.  In this case, someone had expanded the drain plug before inserting it, so the plug didn’t fit securely in the drain, and got jostled out.)   Once the flooding stopped, I unloaded everyone on the creek bank, and pumped the water out of the canoe.    We paddled back to the lodge, while I tried to pretend that I hadn’t just had the fright of my life.    

           

            Two things I have learned about canoeing this summer already: (a) check the snugness of the drain plugs, and (b) do not haul a dead otter into a canoe by his tail.