Windblown in Aialik Bay

            For boats equipped with sails, wind on the ocean can be a wonderful thing.   For boats that do not have sails, wind (especially a lot of it at once) can be one of the most tricky things we deal with.   This was brought home to me on a trip I guided at the Iceberg Lodge this past June, which was the first of many interesting (and occasionally terrifying) scenarios that Alaska handed out to the Iceberg Lodge this summer.

A lone kayak on Aialik Bay

            It was a few days past the summer solstice, and I was out with another guide I’ll call Jay and ten guests.   We’d been scheduled to do a trip across Aialik Bay to a cove on the far shore, but the guides who went out to the beach to scout conditions and set up the kayaks reported wind at our launch point.   We decided that we’d be better off sticking to a route that kept us closer to shore, and informed our clients of the change in plan.   By the time we actually left the point with guests, the wind had died down to almost nothing.   Heading north along the shores of the bay, we actually had pretty idyllic paddling conditions.   After about a mile, the group came to the southern tip of a small island, and we began working our way up its western side, paddling in a wide, protected channel  between the island and the mainland.   Mostly, the island drops down to the water as a series of 30-50 foot cliffs, which are covered with wildflowers and are very scenic to look at, but useless if you're looking for someplace to land.   We checked out some puffins, watched a few murrelets popping up and down.   About forty minutes later, we reached the north tip of the island, and spent a few minutes photographing the glacier at the head of the bay.   Then we started paddling back south, continuing our loop around the island by paddling back along the eastern, more exposed side of the island.   

            After about ten minutes, this began to look like a bad call.   Almost immediately after we started south, the wind began picking up.   Halfway down the island, we reached a sort of marginal landing beach.  This beach is easy to land on in calm conditions, but with any sort of swell or waves, it becomes very tricky to land there safely.   I’d hoped to be able to make a pit stop here, but the swell was picking up enough that I didn’t think we’d be able to land there without courting problems.    We kept paddling south.    And the wind kept blowing, and the swell kept growing larger.   At one point, the waves began coming in so rapidly that my first thought was that we were dealing with a particularly weird boat wake.   Of course, it wasn’t a boat wake; there wasn’t a boat anywhere in the area that could have created it. What we did have was the wind, and lots of it.   I have never in four years of paddling in the bay seen the weather turn that much that quickly.   When we passed middle beach, the conditions were mildly choppy, and by the time we got to the south end, we were paddling in whitecaps and gusts, and I was pretty thoroughly alarmed.   After leaving the marginal beach, I was thinking that it was just going to be a slog getting back to the launch point because we were going to be paddling in a headwind the entire way.   A few minutes later, I was thinking that we needed to get back on the protected side of the island (where there was a protected beach we could land on), and re-evaluate.   A few minutes after that, I was thinking that we weren’t even going to make it that far.   

            We went from marginal paddling conditions straight into hazardous paddling conditions in the space of about eight minutes.   Fortunately, there was one good thing about our current position.   There was a potential landing beach on the south tip of the island, and we were very, very close to it.   The bad thing about this beach was that it faced south, which meant that it was getting pummeled by the incoming waves.   Also, we were paddling south, which meant that to get to the beach, we were going to have to turn broadside to the waves.    Basically this meant that instead paddling directly into the waves, and letting the bow cut through the wave, we were going to have to turn so that the waves were hitting the entire length of the kayak.   If you haven’t spend much time in a kayak, here’s a quick fact: kayaks are not very stable when broadsides to waves. 

            As soon as we got within sight of the beach, I started yelling to the other boats that we were making a landing on the south end of the island, told them to follow my boat, and warned them that as we made our turn, the boats would feel less stable until we got the waves back at our stern.   (This sounded more comforting than what I was thinking, which was that as we made the turn, there was a good chance that one or more of the boats might capsize.)   The wind was loud enough at this point that I really did have to yell just to try and be heard over it.   Apparently that wasn’t even enough, because Jay, faithfully tailing the back of the group, went into loudspeaker mode and started repeating everything I just said for the people at the back of the group.   (He later told me that from the back, I was barely audible even when I was shouting.) And then we were making our turn, and the waves were slapping the side of my boat, pushing the left-hand side up into the air as the wave crested beneath me, and then immediately sucking the left side into the water as the wave passed on.   There was perhaps a minute when I didn’t dare turn around to look behind me because it was taking all of my balance and attention to keep my own boat under control, never mind trying to  keep track of anyone else.   One good thing that the group had going for us was that the clients were all in double kayaks, which are wider, heavier and more stable than the single kayaks that Jay and I were paddling, which meant that Jay and I were getting the rockiest ride. I still thought that one of the client boats was going to biff it when they rounded the corner.   

            Another stroke with the paddle, and my bow was finally pointed towards the beach.   I could still hear Jay behind me hollering instructions to the clients, which mostly consisted of trying to keep the boats from bumping into each other as they made the turn.   The doubles have wide turning radiuses under the best of circumstances, and the waves weren’t making it any easier for the clients to control their boats.   Once I felt that the waves were behind me, I paddled hard towards the beach.   I hit the shore and jumped out of my kayak.    As I stood up, the wind picked up my heavy-duty, vinyl spray skirt and blew it straight out in front of me.   I pulled my kayak far enough out of the water that the waves wouldn’t suck it back out to sea, and immediately started landing boats.   It was not a textbook landing; I basically just grabbed the nearest bow and pulled it far enough up the beach that the kayak grounded out, and then went right for the next boat.   Jay was doing his best to try and stagger the clients coming in so that they weren’t all paddling in on top of each other, but it was still quite a train wreck.   The good thing was that no one had flipped their kayak; I had been fully expecting that Jay was going to have to pick up a couple of swimmers before he’d be able to land.

            As soon as everyone was on shore, Jay became my  hero and immediately jumped into client care mode – making sure that everyone had some granola bars or a couple of fruit strips, passing out my bag of extra gloves and hats to anyone who was cold.  The wind was still howling at this point, and the wind chill, combined with the fact that the guests were no longer creating their own heat by paddling, had made the apparent temperature feel significantly colder than when we were on the water.   I got on the radio, passing on the information about what had happened and where we were, talking at various points to the Iceberg Lodge, to an area water taxi, and to another Lodge guide who had run into the same weather event while paddling on the more protected side of the island.

            While I was managing the logistics of all this, Jay got all the clients huddled in a corner of the beach that was slightly protected from the wind, and started leading everyone in a rousing chorus of the Gilligan’s Island theme song – which seemed appropriate since our three-hour tour had turned into the whole group getting stranded on an island.    He also led a discussion on what the concept of wilderness meant to the individual guests, lead everyone in some staying-warm calisthenics, cleaned up some trash off the beach, and started collecting driftwood to make some wilderness beach art.   In other words, he was a rock star, and kept the clients busy enough that they didn’t have time to get bored, or worried, or cold.

            After about an hour, we were picked up from the beach by our trusty local water taxi, the Weather or Knot, and thanked the captain and crew profusely, especially since he’d never actually landed on that beach before.   We loaded up our kayaks and clients, and then immediately went over to another beach on the mainland, to pick up the other Lodge guide and his clients.   Since this group had been paddling along the western side of the island, they were much more protected from the swell than we were, but they were paddling into a headwind so strong that the group was having difficulty making any forward progress.   We loaded everyone back up in the water taxi, and were dropped off at the landing beach, somewhat windblown but otherwise in good shape.    We thanked the captain again, sent the clients off to the Lodge to eat and warm up, and started unloading and putting away our boats.

Grey weather in the Gulf of Alaska

            The retrospective on this one is that, basically, we were very lucky that we were so close to a landing beach – any landing beach – when the weather turned.    We were also very lucky that the guides who had scouted the beach early in the morning had seen wind and made the call to change our route.   Again, the conditions when we launched were good, and there was nothing in the weather forecast that would indicate we were in for rough weather.   Had the guides not noticed the wind – or had Jay and I decided to paddle our original open-water route when we launched in glassy conditions – the outcome of our adventure could have been very different.   Had the wind caught us while we were out in the middle of the bay, our only feasible option would have been to pull all the kayaks together in a big raft (which is more stable) and hope that the wind blew us good places (like the landing beach on the north end of the bay, or into the protected side of the island) and not bad places (straight into an iceberg, or into a sea cliff, or straight into the face of Aialik Glacier).   We decided on a conservative route, and stuck with that decision even when it looked like we could have changed it.   This was good.

            Another thing this has confirmed is my tendency to be somewhat of a packrat when it comes to guiding trips.      In this case, we had food and extra gloves and hats on hand to give to people who were cold.   Had we been on the island for any significant length of time (if the water taxi hadn’t been able to pick us up, for example), or if any of the clients had actually capsized, having stuff at hand would have been even more critical.   (On a typical trip when I am out with clients, I have with me six pairs of extra hats and gloves, an extra fleece top, an extra pair of socks, two bivvy sacks, two sets of XL shirts and pants, two emergency blankets, half a dozen granola bars, extra water and water purification tablets, a client care kit with sunscreen, bug spray, hand cream, and feminine hygiene essentials, two first aid kits (my own and my company’s) and my personal survival kit.   And this is just for a day trip.)   This is why transporting gear on kayaks is so much nicer than transporting gear by backpack - you can fit a ****ton of gear into a kayak hatch.   

            So that was another good thing.   One thing that didn’t go so well was actually getting the kayaks onto the beach.   Once the kayaks made their turn and felt the waves behind their boats, many of the clients just stopped paddling, counting on the waves to get the kayak the rest of the way into shore.    The clients were right to assume that the waves would do this; they were wrong to assume that the waves would do this in a way they’d appreciate.   

            If you’re riding a wave but not paddling, you’re basically just letting the water do whatever it wants with the boat.   If the wave is pushing your boat at a good angle, you get a free ride in whatever direction the wave is taking you.   If the wave is pushing at a bad angle, it can spin the boat sideways and cause all sorts of nastiness, from a fairly straightforward drenching to the sort of landing where you get slammed head-first into the beach with the boat on top of you.   Fortunately, none of our clients got surfed by the waves, and even our train wreck of a landing was enough to get everyone on shore in one piece.   However, if even one boat had turned sideways and rolled onto the beach, it could have gone very differently – for one thing, as closely as everyone was bunched up trying to land, if one boat had rolled or turned sideways, the other kayaks might not have been able to stop before running over the boat ahead of them.  

            We did a few things right, we did a few things wrong.   The depressing take-away message is that I can’t really pinpoint a fatal flaw – some one little thing that we ignored, or didn’t do, that would have prevented us from getting caught in this weather event entirely.   Kind of hard to predict when even the National Weather Service gets caught off guard.   Not only did the NWS not see this coming, but it also took the local tour boat fleet by surprise as well.   On the water, we customarily monitor the local whale-watching chatter channel on our marine radios, and the entire morning we were hearing snatches of transmissions from some of the tour boats further out in the Gulf of Alaska.   None of what I was able to hear sounded good.   In retrospect, that broken radio chatter turned out to be out best indication that the weather was about to get epic, and is something I will definitely be paying more attention to in the future.

            As it turned out, most of those boats Jay and I heard ended up going back to the harbor due to the conditions.   Even the lodge’s own boat was forced to go back to town without dropping off any of their guests.   For a while, it was looking like the water taxi  crew who’d rescued us were going to be stuck in the bay overnight.   Fortunately, the weather settled down late in the day, and the water taxi was able to get back to town, bringing all of its own day-trip guests, as well as a few of our guests who were trying to get back to town.    During all of the ensuing chaos, several of the guests from the morning tour made a point of thanking Jay and I  for taking such good care of them, and for being so careful of their safety.   (I think they were mostly impressed that Jay and I got first a landing beach and then a water taxi to seemingly materialize out of nowhere.)   I am not really sure whether the clients actually realized that we had crossed the line between perceived risk and actual risk, but we were paddling in conditions on the wrong side of that line for a lot longer than I would have liked.   Everyone was able to control their boat, no one capsized, and no one freaked out, but had we continued paddling in those conditions,  I think it would only have been a matter of time before one or more of the above situations became a reality.

            Once I got back to the Lodge and was able to check the marine weather, the forecast up for the following day was the information we should have gotten for the day we’d just survived - wind calm becoming south twenty knots, seas building to four feet.   Given that the weather out in the Gulf had been bad that morning, I think that what we got caught up in wasn’t so much a change in the wind speed as a change in the wind’s direction.   If a strong wind changed direction in such a way that it was able to suddenly blow unimpeded down the whole twenty-mile length of Aialik Bay, it could possibly bring about the rapid change of conditions that Jay and I experienced.   There are some narrow lakes that are famous for this, and these events are considered very dangerous precisely because there is little to no warning that the wind is increasing.   First, it’s calm.   And then out of nowhere, the wind goes haywire.   I’ve never seen or heard of this happening in Aialik, but its my best guess for what was going on that day.   Either that, or someone at the celestial weather control board found the suck knob, and turned it up to eleven.

The Best of the Guest Comment Cards

            Like many places, the Iceberg Lodge solicits comments from our guests concerning how they enjoyed their stay, and whether they have any suggestions for how we can improve in the future.   Generally, these cards are filled with lots of thank yous to the staff, and recollections of fond memories of their stay.   Very occasionally, we get some interesting suggestions, often from guests who take exception to some of our safety regulations.   Here are a few of the more memorable ones.  

• We would've liked was a little more independence. For example, checking out a kayak and exploring on our own.    Even if you make people do an extra safety briefing before checking out equipment, it would be worth it.

            Even the staff that work here go through several training sessions in the kayaks before they are EVER allowed to take a kayak out by themselves.   The main reason for this is the water temperature - it's pretty cold.   You might have figured that out because of all the glaciers and snow and icebergs.   So, unless you happened to pack your own orange survival suit like the Coast Guard wear, if you capsize your boat, hypothermia is pretty much a guarantee.   Do you want a safety briefing for that?   Here goes.    

"Here’s your kayak.   Don’t flip it over.   If you do flip it over, make sure you’re really close to shore, since you’ll only have about ten minutes before your muscles get so cold that they stop working and you can’t swim.  As long as you are wearing your life jacket, you won’t actually drown.   Instead, you’ll slowly succumb to hypothermia over the next 30-60 minutes.   If you DO get to shore, be prepared to yell and wave your arms a lot.   Not only will this increase your chances of someone hearing you and coming to your rescue, but it will also help to keep the bears from bothering you in the meantime."

• … have the guides sit with the guests at dinner when they are not working.

When guides aren’t working, I generally refrain from trying to tell them what to do.   Just like your boss probably doesn’t call you up at home to tell you where you ought to eat dinner.   We could ask the staff to interact with guests during their time off, but then we’d have to call it work. 

• …I would appreciate more honesty in your advertising.   Your brochures all show close up pictures of bears, whales, seals, and glaciers, but national park rules prohibit getting closer than 1/4 mile to glaciers or seals, or 300 yards from bears.   So, unless I come with a 500-600 mm lens, most visitors cannot get those pictures…

            You’re absolutely right.   Every year, the National Park Service tries to explain the rules and regulations governing proper viewing distances between people and wildlife, but the bears and whales almost never attend these meetings.   

            Seriously, though, it is the goal of all land management agencies and all reputable guide services to manage encounters with wildlife in a way that is (a) safe for the humans and (b) not disruptive to the wildlife.   What distance this translates into varies pretty considerably – most parks and guided outfits have their own best practices.    And FYI, 300 yards is, as best I know, the recommended safe viewing distance for grizzly bears in Denali – it is usually possible to safely view black bears in the Iceberg Lodge's operating area at a much closer range.   Since it's three days into the government shutdown as I'm writing this, it's a bad time to try and look up specifics.

            However, let's assume that you're right, and that the regulations of the park you're visiting prohibit approaching within 300 yards of a bear.   Even if we go out with the firm intention of abiding by this rule, the bears have no problem getting closer – sometimes MUCH closer – to us.    I’ve had guests take amazing full-screen action shots of bears by patiently scoping the animals with their tripods from a few hundred yards away.   I’ve also had guests take amazing full-screen action shots of bears without even using the zoom feature on their point and shoot (generally while simultaneously yelling hey bear and frantically backing away).    

What kind of encounter you get (if you are lucky enough to get an encounter at all) is mostly a matter of luck, and timing.   Time is really the key element here.    The more time you spend out looking for wildlife, the better your chances of finding it.   The more trips you sign up for, the more before-breakfast-walks you drag yourself out of bed for, the longer you spend scanning the shores of the lagoon with your binoculars, the better your chances of being there for the once-in-a-lifetime moment when Mom Bear brings Junior down to the lagoon for his first fishing lesson.    And the better your chances of getting the moment on film.   

 Generally, the best way to get great photos during a visit to Alaska is to bring a lot of patience.   (A decent SLR and a tripod wouldn’t go amiss, either.)   The people who leave the lodge most dissatisfied with their photo opportunities are the ones who brought too much camera gear, and not enough patience.   Finally, just in case you're wondering, all of the pictures on our website were taken on site, and many of the wildlife shots used a lot less zoom than you might think.  

• …Expand your trip options to include hiking up to the face of the glacier and walking on the glacier.

            As you might have noticed, none of our glacier trips actually go right up to the face of the glacier.   This is because we feel that the need to bring all of our clients back to the lodge alive supersedes the need to take pictures of you straddling a crevasse or licking an iceberg.   (Though admittedly those would look really cool on Facebook.)   No matter how much they might look like it – glaciers are not actually big blue rocks.   They are made of ice.   They are not easy to walk on.   They’re slippery.    They have crevasses.   They melt, and bits fall off.   Sometimes the bits are beach-ball sized.   Sometimes the bits are the size of an office building.   

Tidewater glaciers, like the ones we have near the Iceberg Lodge, are even more unstable than other types of glaciers because the water undercuts the glacier's face.    Walking on top of something that is that unstable (even if it doesn’t look it) requires a huge amount of specialized expertise and climbing gear.   There are a number of companies in Alaska that offer commercial glacier trekking or ice climbing –Exit Glacier Guides and MICA Guides are two that I can recommend – but I know of no commercial companies, either in Alaska or out of it, that offer guided trekking on tidewater glaciers.   There is probably a reason for that.

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.  

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.