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Travel Journal: Alaska
Day 6: August 26, 2000
Wildlife Boat Tour to Kenai Fjords
We were taking the Kenai Fjords Tours Northwest Fjord Cruise, which was a 9.5 hour tour that went to the Northwestern Glacier. (Here is our route -- we were on the tour marked in purple). Our boat left at 9am so we got an early start. We checked in at 8:30, and then I remembered to check for our mittens. Walendo found he'd left them in his coat, but I couldn't find mine. I wanted to go back to the hotel and get them, but we'd parked the car in a lot where you put money into a slot based on the spot you're in. So Walendo ended up standing in the spot to make sure no one took it while I rushed back to the hotel. I couldn't find them anywhere, so I gave up, and returned to the spot. When we got back to the checkin area I checked my backpack more carefully and it turned out they were in there all along. Doh. At least I know Walendo would suffer the indignity of standing in a parking spot for me.
 | | Seward, from the boat |
The boat was a good size, maybe a 60 foot boat, nicely maintained. It had a comfortable-looking cabin in the lower deck with about 16 cushioned bench seats, which were all full. So we went upstairs, which had about 8 more seats, but it was in the open. I was dressed warmly, so I figured it would be okay. Seemed better to get a direct view of the scenery, rather than looking through glass. As it turned out, they said they had only a half-full load, so I guess people have to pack themselves tighter when it's full. It felt comfortably populated, so I was glad it wasn't full. (Later, when we were looking at things on either side of the boat, it was nice that there was always room to find railing, you didn't have to look over someone taller than you, or push your way to the front.)
The boat had a capitan (Scott), a first mate (Nancy), and one crew member (Chris), who were introduced to us as we made our way out of the harbor. Scott was up in an enclosed capitan's area and he spoke to us through a mic that went through the boat.  | | Bald Eagle |
He gave us the obligatory safety speil as we motored out of the harbor, and then off we went. They served a simple breakfast, just some packaged danish, but they had hot chocolate and some fruit so I was happy. We went up Resurrection Bay to get out to the Fjords. (Seward is at the mouth of the Bay.) On the way out, he slowed down the boat and took us close to shore to point out two bald eagles that were perched at the top of two trees, one further down, one above it. I'm not sure how he spotted them, but it was cool to see them. We continued on, and as we were approaching Fox Island, Chris pointed out a huge collection (called a "smack") of jelly fish. It just looks like a light area of the water until you get close, and then you see that they're completely covering an entire area, maybe 10 square yards. The water is a beautiful blue-green, so the clear-white jellyfish against the water is quite beautiful (if you don't think about how gross they are). After slowly moving through it we picked up the pace and quickly arrived at Fox Island to pick up a few more passengers. Apparently, they have a whole setup there with little cabins and a main building where they serve meals and such. I gather you can stay overnight there and kayak from there. It seemed nice. After we picked up something like 4 more people, we continued on.
 | | Killer Whale (Orca) |
Not long after we got out of the Bay the boat slowed down and they pointed out some whales not far away. They were killer whales (Orcas), which are apparently the largest species of porpoises but they're also whales, which I'm not sure I understand. After we got a little closer, we saw that there were LOTS of them, something like 10-15 of them. They cut the engine and then we watched. Nancy got on the loud speaker and she seemed to know a lot about the whales. She said there are about 8 pods who live in this area, and she recognized which one it was, and even recognized certain whales. She said it was "AJ pod" and then the individual whales are numbered, so she would say "I believe that's AJ12." She said they were sleeping, which they do by clustering together so that they're nearly touching, and then they just glide up and down, in and out of the water. You could see a cluster of fins and then the bodies rise out of the water and then back in again. There was one adolescent male that was slapping its tail on the water, generally playing. At first they were a ways off, but over time, they came closer to us so that we could see them pretty close up. It was really impressive.  | | Two Killer Whales |
I took about a zillion pictures, not able to resist each time they came significantly out of the water. Nancy told us that the pods are a matriarchy, that there is one dominant female, and the children stay with her their whole life. They'll come together with another pod for a little while to mate, and then everyone goes back with their family. They weigh around 15,000 pounds. At some point, she got off the loud speaker and came out with us to look and it was clear she was excited as we were about seeing them. We stayed there quite a while and got a really good, long look at them. It was quite a treat to see so many whales so close up for so long.
 | | Seals and Birds on Rock |
While we were travelling, we struck up a conversation with two women who were from Alaska, Donia and Leila (we think those were their names). They had come here as kids because their parents were in the military and were stationed here. They lived in Anchorage and worked at GCI, a telecommunications company. Leila is a programmer and Donia worked in marketing. We asked a bunch of questions about what it was like living in Alaska. They claimed the winter in Anchorage isn't as cold as it is in places like Minnesota and New York, though I find that hard to believe -- maybe upstate New York near Buffalo. They said they have remote car starters, so they can start their car from the house about 25 minutes before they're ready to go. Still, they both said they really liked living there. It seemed like you'd always be out exploring places if you lived here, but they said it's just like anywhere else, that you're busy with your life most of the time. They had been to most of the towns and attractions, though. They said they mostly go to places like Hawaii, Seattle, and Arizona on vacation. After a while, we started talking about where they worked, and Donia started giving us a little bit of marketing talk about her company, which resells all types of communications channels (local phone, DSL, cable, some cable modems, and cell). She started to brag about how well they were doing and giving us statistics and surface-level tech talk, which turned us both off, but we moved on from there. We told them stories about living in the Bay Area, how expensive and crowded it is, probably not enough on how nice it is to offset it.
 | Porpoise swimming
by our boat |
After a while, we stopped again at a point where there were lots of sea lions lying on a rock with a bunch of birds nesting in the cracks of the rocks above. The sea lions looked just like they do at home: lazy and cute. A little while longer, we came into a cove where we saw another whale, this time a humpback, which are much bigger than the killer whales, I think she said as much as 100,000 pounds, which is hard to imagine. This time we didn't see it very close up. They had spotted it on one side of the cove and then after about 5 minutes it was on the other side, and we saw it breathe through the blow hole and we caught its fin and tail a few times, but we didn't see much of the whale, too bad. When it seemed like it wasn't going to come our way, we moved on again. After a short time, we came up on some porpoises. There were a bunch of them and they travelled along side the boat with us, jumping in and out of the water, as if they were playing with us. Nancy said that unlike other animals, they like to hear noise from the boat, so people were pounding on the walls and shouting and generally making a ruckus. I managed to get just one shot of the porpoises, but it was great to see them running alongside us. It was amazing how much wildlife we'd seen already.
 | | Northwestern Glacier |
At some point around here they served lunch, a bunch of stuff in a plastic basket. They had chicken sandwiches on wheat rolls, fruit, trail mix, a cookie and other stuff. It was a perfectly fine lunch. We continued on into the area where we'd see glaciers. We went deep into another Bay where there were glaciers all around, and we went all the way in to the Northwestern Glacier. As we motored in, Walendo pulled out his emap GPS and it had the name of the bay we were in, which was pretty impressive. We started to see chunks of ice floating on the water with the glacier at the water's edge up ahead, and as we got closer, it started getting colder and colder, like walking into a freezer. Still, I had my three, count 'em, three layers of fleece over a turtleneck with a windbreaker on top, so I was reasonably comfortable. Fleece rules. Distances were really deceptive since everything was so big, cuz it kept seeming like we were close but we kept going. I saw some brown things that looked like logs on some of the floating icebergs and then I realized they were seals.  | Northwestern Glacier
with icebergs |
I can't imagine how they could possibly be warm. Finally, we got about 1/3 of a mile away, which seemed practically at the glacier. The glacier was beautiful, acquamarine blue ice cracked in intricate patterns, inching its way along huge slabs of granite. There were also big slabs that were brown, the way packed snow looks in a city a few days after it snows. It seemed to me that someone should come and clean it up -- it was much less attractive with all that dirt. Again they cut the engine and we listened to it and watched it as pieces calved off. We didn't see the giant pieces of wall calving off that you see in the nature films, but even so, we did see chunks drop off into the water and some came down from higher above. It was surprising how long it took for a piece to make it down, which gave another cue about how deceptive the size and distance was. Each time, the falling ice would make a deep, grumbling, bass sound that was really impressive. We watched for quite a while, again getting our fill.
 | Closeup of
Northwestern Glacier |
We had learned at Glacier Point how glaciers form, and Chris repeated it here. The snow falls and since it never melts, the layers of snow landing on top put pressure on the snow below, and over many years, the snow becomes extremely compressed under the weight of the layers above. They said that explained why it was blue, but we didn't understand why highly compressed ice would be blue. Anyway, as the glaciers move along the land, a few inches to a foot a day, they carve out the land into meadows and valleys. Along most of the glaciers we saw, there was a gravel strip through the middle, called a moraine, which is where two glaciers came together and pushed up the land between them. After seeing it close up, we got a much better sense of how powerful glaciers are.
 | | Two otters |
Finally we turned around and started to head back. As we were still making our way back through the bay we'd entered, Scott announced that there was a brown bear in the hills off to one side. He brought the bought off the coast and pointed it out to us. It was fairly high up and was mostly a black blob on the green land, but you could make out its ears and its head. It seemed to be looking back out at us. Afer a while, it trundled off. Wow, a bear -- I certainly hadn't expected to see that on a boat trip! Also in that bay we saw two otters floating on their backs, appearing to pose for us. These two weren't diving and muching the way the other were, they were just floating with their faces, arms and legs popping out of the water. Such cuties.
 | | Walendo & Ellen |
Most of the rest of the way home we just motored along. I ended up sitting next to Leila again, and we chatted some more, this time about working as a programmer in Alaska. She's a Unix hacker, programming in C, which she said is relatively rare up here. She's working for GCI now, but she'd worked as a programmer for oil companies in the past. She said it's a relatively small community of programmers who all tend to know each other. I asked her about wages, and was surprised to learn that an experienced programmer would make around $65K to $85K, substantially less than the Bay Area. Still, the median house is about $180K and she said she lives comfortably and is able to save a comfortable amount, so maybe it works out similarly. They also have no state income tax, no property tax, and no state sales tax, though a few counties have local sales tax. So they get to keep a big chunk of their paycheck. Leila said a friend of hers had moved down to California and gotten a $20K raise and ended up taking home the same amount as she had in Alaska. Ugh. Leila said she and her boyfriend are building a house together and she was psyched about how she was getting to wire the place so that everything could be remotely controlled (I gather with X10). She said she was putting in a system that would let her call home and tell it what time to have the hot tub ready and it would calculate the outside temperature and turn it on at the right time. It seemed like we'd get along with her just fine. It's nice to know there are geeks everywhere you go.
 | | View of Kenai Fjords |
During the rest of the trip back, we kind of zoned out a while, enjoying the scnery and letting our minds wander. After a while, we tried out our tape deck system to listen to Harry Potter. We were pleased that it worked just fine. As we got closer, again we found about a half-dozen whales, possibly the same pod we'd seen before. They were sleeping again, dipping out and back in the water in a line. We watched for a while, and then moved on. Finally, we approached Seward again (with Walendo making sure we were going the right way with his emap), and Scott told us a little bit about the town. He told us about the 1964 earthquake that devastated the town. Apparently it destroyed the entire beachfront and all the buildings along it. First the quake hit, then it was hit by a few tsunamis caused by the earthquake, which collapsed a bunch of oil tanks, which then burned all along the coast. The coast guard thought the town was a total loss as they saw nothing but black smoke rising out of the town. Still, some of the town survived and they've gradually rebuilt over the years.
 | | Birds on a ledge |
Finally, we reached the docks again. It was a wonderful day. I really liked how this tour was run. The crew gave us plenty of time to look at the animals and gave us meaningful information about them. Even with the loud speaker, it felt like they were really talking to us, not just giving the regular spiel, and then they'd come out with us and share in the fun. The Frommer's guide had said this tour was a bit impersonal, but we didn't find it that way at all. We gave them a genuine thank you as we left.
It had just started to rain as we arrived, and at this point, we were both pretty chilled so we went back to the room and warmed up a bit. (Even three layers of fleece has its limits when you're in the cold for 10 hours.) When we warmed up, we went out to find dinner. We wanted to find someplace that served fish and chips for Walendo and clam chowder for me, but surprisingly, the smaller, less expensive places were closed near the harbor. It's odd how they close around 6. We didn't feel like spending another $50 for dinner, so we drove back to the downtown area. Most of the places looked kind of run down, so we eventually decided to try one of the two Chinese places. This turned out to be good. I got a big bowl of Won Ton Soup and Walendo got one of the dinner meals, and we managed to eat for less than $20, quite a feat around here. After dinner we stopped back in one of the souvineer shops we'd been in before and I got another shirt, this one for Mike, and Walendo got the joke weather meter for my dad. He also got some trinkets for his Irish cousins for Xmas. Then we went up to Safeway to get a few items so we could pack a lunch for tomorrow's kayaking trip. Despite the cold and the rain, I decided I still had to get the homemade ice cream but when we stopped there, they had no more chocolate. Again, it's hard to fathom. Right near the creamery is a Subway, so Walendo decided to get a sandwich for tomorrow. Given the rain, we were worried about the weather for tomorrow's trip. When we got back to the room, we checked the weather channel and it said 90% chance of rain tomorrow. We wondered if it made sense to go. In the room, we watched a little meaningless TV and listened to some Harry Potter, but I quickly started to drift off, so we stopped the tape and went to sleep.
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