So You Want To Work in Alaska?

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            So, for whatever reason, you’ve decided that you want to spend a summer working in Alaska.   Maybe it’s for the adventure, for the wildlife, or for the fact that a job up here fits in really well with your school’s academic calendar.   Good for you.   Working up here can be both a one-off summer adventure, or a first step into full-time job, or a brand-new career completely different from anything you ever thought you'd realistically be doing with your life.   (If that sounds like an enticement, great.   If that sounds like a warning, that’s because it is.)   Alaska is an amazing place, although if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve already figured that out.   And the summer is the best time of the year (some people would say the only good time of year) to visit the state.   Now here’s the reality check –the jobs up here are about as competitive as anywhere else these days.   Probably even more competitive since the Lower 48 reality-TV film industry has discovered the state, and has set to work chronicling everything from the fishing industry to the highway patrol to the efforts of Alaska-grown amateur gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, and survivalists.

            The folks who come up to Alaska to work tend to fall into one of two broad categories – the wilderness people, and the wildlife people.

            Wilderness people get an REI dividend check that is larger than some people’s weekly pay. You have a home ski mountain, and have climbed all of the major 5.10 routes in a three state area.   Most of your clothing wicks.   You need a roof rack or small trailer to  fit all of their outdoor gear in their car.   You leave your house at 4AM on a Saturday in order to start your backpacking trip as soon as the sun comes up.   You can talk knowledgably about varying models of camp stoves, and have strong opinions about the advisability of bringing down sleeping bags into the backcountry.    

            The other large contingent of Alaskan seasonal workers are the wildlife people.   If your first reaction when you see an animal is to make high-pitched cooing sounds, you are probably a wildlife person.   Other signs of a potential wildlife person include ownership of high-grade camera equipment, a library containing an inordinate number of natural history books, and framed pictures of penguins hanging on your wall.   If you have ever purchased a field guide to a region you have no immediate intention of visiting, just to learn more about the indigenous animals, you are a wildlife person.   You’ll be in good company up here – many Alaskan tourists, to one degree or another, are wildlife people – and the bigger, cuter, and furrier the wildlife is, the better.

            So once you get up here, you’ll have plenty of company.    But first, you need to get a job, or at the very least, come up here with enough skills, experience, and determination to be able to find a job after you arrive.   To that end, here are a few suggestions for what not to put in your cover letter.   

            Don’t tell us about how you want to come up here to experience Nature.  Trust us, we already know.    If you are applying from Ohio to work as a housekeeper for the Middle-of-Nowhere Lodge, or at a gift shop at the Denali National Park entrance area, we already know that the only reason you’re interested in the job is because of its proximity to an iconic Alaskan National Park.    But you’d look like a better employment prospect if you keep this knowledge to yourself.   Because it’s pretty clear that no one comes to Alaska because of the appealing climate, or the cultural opportunities, or really, any reason other than better access to giant wilderness areas, and really cool wildlife.

            Second, don’t necessarily be so keen to talk about how you spend all your free time hiking or mountain biking or extreme zorbing or whatever it is you like to do outside.   Is it relevant to the job you’re applying for?   Are you coming to Alaska to be a zorb guide?   If not, perhaps leave that out.   If you have legitimate outdoor or sports credentials – a wilderness first aid course, or a summer working at a climbing wall, or you earned your Eagle Scout award by building a handicap-accessible nature trail for your local city park, and you can make these accomplishments vaguely relevant to the job you are applying for, then by all means mention them.   But don’t talk about how you want to come to Alaska to hike and fish and take pictures of wildlife from unsafe distances.   That’s why the tourists come to Alaska.   Instead, tell us what you can do that will facilitate the tourists having those experiences.    Once you get up here, you, too will have the opportunity to hike, fish, and piss off (excuse me, photograph) the local wildlife.   But before you can do all that, first you have to convince someone in Alaska to actually give you a job.   

            Also, it’s probably not a great idea to talk about how bad-ass of an outdoor person you are, unless it’s relevant to the job you’re applying for, and you have the experience or certifications to back it up.   Because the person who is reading your cover letter is very probably a long-term resident, or sourdough, Alaskan.   They shoot their own meat, go skijoring with their dogs at minus twenty degrees, and club salmon on the head with sticks.   This person has been in the state long enough to get a year-round position with the company that’s hiring you, and could very well be the manger or owner.   This person is probably more of an outdoor guru than you are, and probably has a number of highly skilled outdoor guides working for them already.   These are the folks who watch the Discovery Channel, and talk about how Bear Grylls is doing it all wrong.   Don’t try to out-outdoors them, because it probably won’t work.

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            So what are Alaskan employers looking for?   Generally the same things as employers everywhere – experience, reliability, and a good attitude.   That being said, here are a few suggestions for prospective Alaskan summer workers.   This is especially tailored to anyone who is looking to get a job as a guide or outdoor instructor.   (I’d like to point out that these are my own personal opinions, not those of any company I work for, nor am I involved in hiring decisions for any company I work for.   And if you ask me about how to get a summer job in Alaska, I will tell you what I tell everybody – look on coolworks.com.) 

           

            If you are interested in working as a guide, have you taken a wilderness first aid course?   If the outdoor recreation field has anything like an industry-standard basic qualification, the wilderness first responder, or WFR, is definitely it.   In some ways, it is more valuable to a prospective guide than a college degree.   (I’ve worked with guides that have masters’ degrees in wildlife management, and with others that dropped out of college in their second semester.)   Some veteran guides have a list of outdoor certifications as long as your arm, but generally for a guide starting out, the single most helpful credential you can have would be a WFR.   It’s a ten-day course, offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School as well as a number of other regional outdoor training or recreation companies.   Expect to pay around $700-800 for the course, and if you want to stay certified you’ll need to take a 3-day refresher course every two years.   

            Even for people who have no intention of ever working as a guide, or ever setting foot in the wilderness, I’d recommend taking this course simply for the life skills it imparts.   It’s sort of like the Red Cross first aid course as taught by MacGuyver.   Plus, even if you never mean to put yourself in a wilderness situation, a wilderness situation could show up nonetheless – such as a friend who came very close to delivering his wife’s baby in their living room when she went into labor during a blizzard that had shut down most of the roads in their county.   I am not the kind of person that tends to throw around the word ‘empowering’ very often, but in this instance I think the term applies.   

            Aside from wilderness medical skills, the other two most important qualities we’re looking for are both hard to put in a resume – people skills, and good judgment, or what I’d like to call advanced common sense.    By and large, beginning guides don’t need to be wildlife experts, or botanists, or know the latin name for sphagnum moss.   However, beginning guides do need to be able to learn basic information about the local plants and animals, and also find a way to convey that information to guests in an engaging manner – all the while cracking jokes, being friendly, and putting clients at ease in what is for most people a very unfamiliar environment.   That’s where the people skills come in.

            Generally speaking, tourists to Alaska don’t need the Verna Pratt Field Guide to Alaskan Wildflowers thrown at them on their first day in the state.   Pointing out the really bright and colorful flowers, such as lupine, fireweed, and monkeyflower, will be enough to satisfy most non-plant people.   People who are seeing a bear in the wild for the first time do not actually care about the flowers growing next to the bear.    But the tourists both need and appreciate having someone with them in the field who acts as a host – sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm, lending someone bug spray when they forgot theirs back at their cabin, or asking how their pictures of that bear turned out when you see them at the bar that evening.

            People skills are also very relevant to group safety.   As a guide, you will at times be the sole person in charge of a group of people who may never have been in a backcountry area before this trip.   You need to be able to constantly assess both the clients and the environment around you for possible hazards.   You need to know not only your own abilities, but you need to be able to accurately assess the abilities and comfort level of your clients, some of whom you will have known for less than a day.    This requires both leadership skills as well as tactful group management – advanced people skills, so to speak.

            If you are reasonably outdoorsy person applying to work as a kayak guide, your company can and will teach you how to be a good sea kayaker.   They will teach you things like how to rescue clients that have flipped their kayak, or how to tow an exhausted paddler back to shore.   They will teach you skills.   They will teach you technical expertise.   The thing to keep in mind is that technical expertise is NOT the same thing as good judgment.   Good judgment is about when and how to use those skills – and more importantly, it is about being able to run your trips conservatively enough so that you DO NOT HAVE TO CALL UPON your awesome rescue skills.   That is something that’s harder to teach, if it can be taught at all.   Mostly I think it’s equal parts common sense and experience.   For most beginning guides, myself included, it’s a happy combination of common sense and plain luck that carries us (and our clients) through our first few months on the job.

            Even after you’ve gained some experience, not every trip you lead will go according to plan.  In fact, I can just about guarantee that something will go spectacularly wrong on at least one or two trips a season, and you will be the person who will, for better or worse, be dealing with it.   Your choices will decide whether the trip ends badly, or ends as a story that everybody has a good laugh about later that night at the bar.   

            One of the best ways to learn from trip catastrophes is to talk about them with other guides.   Be prepared to share mistakes or near-misses, or things that just didn’t go as well as they might have.   Be prepared to listen to other guides’ mistakes – we all have a few, trust me – and try to learn from them.   Your mistakes are going to teach you more than you could ever learn from anyone else – however, it will speed up your learning curve (and would probably be a lot better for your clients) if you tried to learn as much as you can from other guides’ mistakes as well.   

            For example, after leading canoe trips in Pedersen Lagoon for three years, I now know where all of the sandbars and barely-submerged rocks in the lagoon are.   I did not learn this from studying a map, or scouring the coastline with binoculars at a low tide.   Mostly, I learned where all the rocks are by smacking into them with my canoe.   Once you’ve hit a submerged rock with a canoe full of guests (and their usual reaction when the boat hits a submerged object is to peer at the water like they suspect that crocodiles are going to pluck them from the boat at any moment), you’ll remember the location of that particular rock for the rest of your natural life.   And you’ll swear that you’re never again going to do anything so stupid as get a canoe full of guests hung up on a sandbar, in full view of some guy with a tripod taking pictures from the dock.   Which will be true until you find another sandbar at the other side of the lagoon next week...

Still interested in working up here?   Then I wish you the best of luck.   (And if you're still looking for a job in Alaska, be sure to check out coolworks.com - they have a pretty comprehensive list of seasonal Alaskan employers...) 

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.