Adventures in Alaskan Car Ownership

I am back in Alaska, after having been gone for most of the winter.   Alaska, the hussy that she is, welcomed me back with a nasty head cold, negative windchill, and a broken-down car.   Missed you, too.   Maybe I should have stayed away longer.

 

Looking north across the frozen Kenai Lake

I caught a ride down to my cousins on the local bus from Anchorage.   These rides tend to be very interesting from a people-watching perspective, and this trip was no exception.   I ended up sitting a row in front of a guy who was going to Seward to (a) work at the local fish processing plant, and (b) recruit fellow workers at the plant to leave their jobs there in April and go work for his fishing crew once the salmon season starts.   Apparently, the seafood processing plant is OK with him doing this.    But, the guy was also calling the plant every time the bus went through patches of cell phone signal, as though the arrangement perhaps wasn't entirely settled.  He also kept inviting everyone else on the bus (actually, it was mostly the women) to come sit next to him, and was telling me a bunch of stories about his years working on the Time Bandit, one of the boats featured on the TV show Deadliest Catch.   I’d never seen any of the episodes he was referring to, but that only made him more eager to fill me in on what I’d missed.   He never really got the picture that I wasn't looking for a glamorous job in the fishing industry.    

            Even though I’d heard about the weird winter, I was still surprised at how little snow was on the ground.   There was a tiny dusting, but I could still see through the snow to the layer of leaves below it.   Everything was very solidly frozen and a little crunchy to walk on.   Even the unplowed parts of my cousins' Myriad Network of Victor Creek Driveways were passable - even when driving my station wagon, the Penguin, which has less ground clearance than many species of reptile.   In a lot of ways Alaska looked like it was still November, and I had never left.

      The next day, I was able to jump-start the Penguin, after being initially defeated by a frozen hood latch on the car I was jumping from.   

The following day, I took the car into town to see my doctor, after getting sick with a really bad cold that I suspected was the flu (it wasn't, thankfully, but the high fever and body aches were sort of pointing that direction).  I went to the doctor's office and then to the grocery store to get some throat drops.   By this point the snow had shown up in a big way, and on the way back up the road to my cousins’, the visibility started to get really bad. I pulled over by the Bear Creek Fire Station to try and clear off my windshield and wait it out.   The Penguin idled for about a minute, then a bunch of warning lights lit up dashboard, and the car died.   When I tried to restart it, the battery just made those no-hope clicking sounds.   

 Fortunately, I’d gotten a AAA policy for the Penguin before I came back north, so I called their 800 number.   The rep I spoke with said that she’d arrange a tow with the closest available operator, but she couldn’t tell me where the tow truck would be coming from.   Knowing the distances between towns in Alaska, this sort of raised a red flag, since if the tow truck were coming from anywhere other than Seward, it would be at least three hours away.    The rep assured me, in answer to my questions, that the tow truck would definitely be there within two hours, and the driver would call me when he was getting close.  That sounded OK.   So I cowered in the doorway of the fire station, and called a local taxi.   When the driver came by, he already had a customer in his car (as well as a girlfriend and a small dog), and had swung by to get me out of the kindness of his heart when he heard that my car was dead.   Unfortunately, he was heading out to the end of Nash Road, (which is about as far away as it is possible to drive in Seward) and told me it would be at least 45 minutes to an hour before he could drop me off at the school, where I was hoping to meet Kate and get a ride back to her house.  At this point I was still under the impression that the two truck would be arriving within the next 90 minutes.   If the tow truck did arrive on time, and I wasn’t able to get back to my car to meet the driver, I was kind of screwed.   So I asked the taxi to just drop me off before he turned down Nash Road, and I’d walk from there.   

Not the best call I’ve ever made.   Remember how I said I’d come to town originally because I thought I had the flu?   Walking a half mile in blowing snow and negative windchill was probably not what my doctor had in mind when he told me to rest and drink fluids.    I made it about twenty yards before my already-stressed throat just started closing up.   

“You want to breathe this air?” said my throat.   “If I have to breathe this air, then maybe I’m just not going to breathe at all…”   

So I huddled with my back to the wind to try and keep from further pissing off my throat, and I called Kate. She bravely came out in a whiteout and rescued me from the side of the road.   She is my hero. 

When people think of the stereotypical Alaskan person, a lot of people tend to think of someone who’s a little bit like MacGuyver in Carhardts.   The state likes to think that we’re all a big bunch of rugged, highly capable individualists bravely soldiering our way singlehandedly through the last great wilderness, effortlessly hiking through mountain ranges, returning in the evening to hand-built cabins and feasting on meat from the moose we killed with our bare hands back in October.   And yes, there are some people who are actually like this.   However, the Alaska I more typically see is more a  population of somewhat rugged, and mostly capable people who are ferociously interdependent on each other for a lot of what we need to live here.  I’ve asked neighbors for (and been asked for in return) everything from child care, to borrowing food, fishing equipment, snowshoes and tire chains.   Alaskans are each others' backup plans, and generally the whole system works pretty well.   Though Alaska has never had a problem with taking folks down a notch if she suspects you might be getting ideas about your general competence.   Like causing your car to die in a whiteout on a day you're runing a 101 degree fever.   (At least the Penguin waited until after I’d seen the doctor before it went belly-up.)

Kate had some work to finish up at the school, so I hung out in her classroom and waited for the Triple A driver to call me.   He didn’t.  At 5:15 I called Triple A back, and was again told that the driver would be at the car by 5:30 at the latest.    I was further informed that if I wasn’t at the car by the time the driver arrived, the tow could be cancelled.   The rep said she’d contact dispatch about where the driver actually was, and would call back.   Five minutes later, Triple A calls back... except it’s someone wanting me to rate the quality of my service call.   I ask him was he aware that I was still waiting for the driver.   He said no, and said he’d contact dispatch about where the driver was, and would call me back.    Slightly alarmed that I was going to miss the driver and have the tow cancelled, Kate and I left the school as soon as we could, and went back to the car.   No one there.   No one called me back.  My cell phone was getting low on juice, and my golden-hearted cousin Kate wanted to get home before it got dark, (it was still snowing) and the visibility went from bad to worse.   At 6pm, we put a note on the car and left.   I called Triple A again when we got back to Kate’s house.   This time, I was told that the new arrival time for the driver was 8:05pm; she apologized that no one had called me to tell me this.   She again said the driver would call when he was 20 minutes away.   8pm came and went.   I called Triple A a fourth time, and was told that the driver would arrive within the hour.   (At least this time they weren’t trying to make up an exact arrival.)   Finally at 8:20 we got a call from the driver, and drove back down to Seward to meet him at the car.   The Penguin was sent on its way to the auto shop, and we went back to the school so that Kate could pick up a few more things to work on over the weekend.   

Turns out the dispatcher gave the tow to a company coming from… Anchorage.   Which is totally three hours away, even in good weather.   Kate told me that her family has had similar issues in the past with Lower 48 dispatchers having no idea about the distances between Alaska towns.   I found out during one of the last phone calls with Triple A that I could have had the local Seward tow truck  get the car, and that I would have had to pay the driver, and then the company would reimburse me.   Which I would have been totally OK with, had I known I had that option.   They said the original dispatcher should have made it clear I had that choice, and actually suggested I follow up with a complaint.   But at least the car made it down to the shop OK.   Happily, the electrical problem was traced to a loose belt, which the mechanic fixed for free.   The shop did find a rusting tie end that needs to be replaced, (the part is on order from Anchorage) but it was all in all a much cheaper repair bill that I had feared.

Snow-covered train tracks

            In other car-related news, my cousins’ new mailbox was taken out by the snowplow a few days ago.   This is slightly ironic since they moved the box to its new location specifically to try and keep it from being hit by cars. The next morning, we effected repairs to her box (and her neighbors’ which had also gotten demolished) by tying them to the sides of the railing they had been mounted to.   Unfortunately, the post office specifies how close the boxes need to be to the road, so moving the post back isn’t really an option.   We’ll just hope that in the future the snowplow driver isn’t quite so diligent about trying to clear the entire shoulder.

The Wine Trenches

            For most of November and December of this winter, I’ve been in West Virginia, and back working at the Wine Shop as a way to make some extra money while still staying close enough to help out my mother recover from her hip replacement last month.   So I’ve been spending a lot of time in the wine trenches, which are actually pretty good trenches to be in.   For one thing, the customers are generally pretty happy when they're shopping in our store.  

            The wine store I work at is part of a small boutique market of about half a dozen vendors.   The various stores makes the market a great place to people-watch, since we have not only our own shop’s regular customers, but also the regular customers of all of our neighboring vendors.   Many of our regulars are food-obsessed. They look rapturous when talking about goat cheese, and can remember what specific vintages of wine were served at their wedding twenty-seven years ago.   These folks are probably as close as West Virginia gets to having real foodies, and most of them love our shop. By association, the foodies love everyone who works here, too.   (And it’s mutual. Mostly.)    However, this means that taking lunch breaks in the market’s public areas has its downsides.   Earlier in December, I went on break, and sat down at a small table in the market’s public area to eat my lunch.   Even though I work at a gourmet food shop, I am not a gourmet food person.   My lunch was a two-day-old piece of stale pizza.   Two mouthfuls in, a guy who I vaguely recognize as a Wine Shop regular comes over to my table,  leans over the plate and takes a big sniff of my cold, stale slice of pizza.

            “Is that any good?” he asks.

            I said yes (though I’m not sure it was very intelligible since my mouth was still full of pizza), and went back to eating.   He wandered away with a puzzled look.   I looked back at my stale pizza and wondered if I'd just outed myself as a food cretin.

            I know that as a wine salesperson, I talk to customers about food.   This usually does not extend to the food that I bring in for my lunch break.   Because even if I were a real for-sure gourmet cook, no one who works in retail has the time to make meals like that during December.  So please, Mr. Wine Spectator, do not be judgey about my lunch.   Especially when you lean into my personal space bubble to sniff my food, and especially when I do not know who you are.   That’s creepy.   

            One seasonal project involved mailing out eighty individual bottles of a particular cabernet to an architectural firm’s clients.   The specific wine they chose comes in a non-standard-sized wine bottle.   There are only a handful of non-standard-sized wines in the store, but they had to go and pick one.   And since the bottle is a weird shape, it doesn’t fit in the wine shipping containers very well.  So I spent the better part of three days finagling the bottles into the shipping containers.   It took a ton of tissue paper to wedge the bottles so they didn’t rattle around.   The eighty bottles were all going to separate addresses all over town, and the total cost of shipping the wine came to over twelve hundred dollars.   The company would have done a lot better to pay an intern to rent a van and hand-deliver the wine in person.  I mean, I would have happily delivered all that wine to their clients for a quarter of what FedEx is charging them.

            One fun thing that happens during the holiday season is that we host a lot of wine tastings in the store.   We hold the tastings in an adjacent building, and generally we try six or seven wines, plus a little appetizer spread of fancy cheese, crackers, chocolates, or whatever else we think would pair well.   One themed tasting we do every year is a blind tasting of red wines.   Prior to the tasting, we wrap all the bottles in brown bags so that the neither the servers nor the tasters have any idea what wine they’re tasting until the very end.   It is, according to many wine experts, a better way to judge a wine, because the taster isn’t being influenced by the wine’s price.   (People generally perceive more expensive wines as tasting better.)   The day before the blind tasting, our manager had a strange phone conversation with one of our regular customers, in which he had to explain that we do not actually blindfold people for the blind tasting.   (She was unsure about attending because she ‘didn’t think her husband would be into that sort of thing.’)

            The only problem with the wine tastings is that we almost always run out of tickets  - they nearly always sell out.   Which means that the customers who know this will call the shop as soon as we open on Sunday to reserve tickets.   The phone starts ringing at noon and literally does not stop for fifteen minutes.   After that, we get walk-in sales, and more phone calls, and eventually the tasting sells out.  We hit this limit around 1:30pm and from then until the tasting begins at 2pm, it's the Half Hour of Rage.   This is the one time where we have to do what no sales person ever wants to do to a client.   We have to tell them ‘No’.   This pisses some people off to no end.   And I have to deal with a steady stream of pissed or and/or disappointed customers, occasionally interspersed with the arrival of someone who was bright enough to reserve a spot in advance.   Not all of the disappointed customers are mad.   It’s usually a trajectory – from confidence that their request will be offered, to a sudden dip into confusion and disappointment.   Some customers continue from there to either outrage (or plain old rage) or kicked-puppy-like disappointment. 

            In some ways, the timing works out perfectly.   By the time we deal with the last of the disgruntled customers, the tastings has already started, and will be a growing pile of not-quite-empty bottles that need emptying…

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.

Alaskan Signs of Spring

Spring in Alaska is...

• The day of the vernal equinox.    
• The day the first rock sandpiper arrives in town.     
• The day that your favorite restaurant opens for the season.     
• The day the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, instead of whatever weird alternate schedule it’s been following since November.    
• The first day when you can actually see grass in your yard.    
• The first day that the grass actually looks green. 
• The day you drain the antifreeze out of the water system on your boat/RV/vacation home.   
•  The day the humpback whales return from Hawaii.    
• The day your neighbor returns from Hawaii.    
• The day you can smell the dog poop melting out of snow on the waterfront.   
•  The day you take the studded tires off of the car.    
• The day when ice is no longer filling in all the potholes on the road to the dump.    
• The day you can see the yellow parking lines in the Safeway parking lot.   
•  The day a motorhome camps at the campground.    
• The day a tent camper camps at the campground.    
• The first day that the bears raid trash cans on Dora Way.     
• The day the first cruise ship arrives in port. 
• The first day of salmon-fishing season.  
•  The day you realize its been a week since you had to scrape ice off of your car.   
•  The day you walk outside without a coat and don’t regret the decision.   
• The day you want to eat ice cream.    
• The day you run into a seasonal worker who’s gotten back into town.    
• The day you spot your first group of tourists.    
• The day you see a leaf sprouting on a cottonwood tree.    
• The day you decide that the skis should probably go back in the garage.    
• The day you grill outside.