Travelers' Tales Alaska (14 page)

As the rainy day passes noon, I wrap up my expedition with one last stroll around my village. Ed and Ruth are gone for the day, their trailer locked. Bill and Terri plan to camp here all week, until their daughter flies in to meet them. Woody and Rose take off for Talkeetna, “unless the weather stays this bad. If it does, we'll camp at the Wal
Mart in Wasilla.” The Chugach have disappeared under low clouds flowing like thick cream.

Dick and Keith invite me for a last cup of coffee, this time out of the rain, at the McDonald's inside Wal
Mart. Tom ambles by, observing that I'm in danger of becoming a “lot rat.”

“Better than being a house rat,” I respond.

After coffee, I take up my sink-drain bucket and lock the camper door. My restless spirit is primed after this weekend among road wayfarers. Now that the Alaska Highway is paved, I could just keep going, on to the next Wal
Mart and the next.… I jump into the truck cab, slide Dire Straits into the cassette player, sing “Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug” and head off down the road.

Ellen Bielawski is a co-editor of this book. She never camps at Wal
Mart unless looking for a story.

TOM DUNKEL

Alaska-in-miniature is just a quick drive south of Anchorage.

A
BOUT THE ONLY THING THAT ISN'T OVERPRICED IN
Alaska is advice. Folks still dispense it free just like in the Lower 48, and right now I'm getting a friendly earful.

“Don't hesitate when you're here, 'cause you may not ever be here again,” says Eddy, who is urging me to push the tourist envelope during my stay in Alaska. “This is wilderness fantasyland. There's nothin' left like it, unless it's Siberia, and it's pretty hard to travel there.”

We've never met before. Eddy just happens to be sitting two bar stools from me at Ray's seafood restaurant in Seward, which just happens to be one of the hot towns on the Kenai Peninsula.… Eddy wears a big cowboy hat, smokes big cigars, and has a small airplane. He lives in Wyoming and frequently flies north to sportfish. He's crazy for Alaska, so much so that he wouldn't mind dying here. Apparently, the perfect way to go is to be devoured by a grizzly bear.

“That's
gotta
elevate you to a higher plane,” declares Eddy, smitten by the prospect of traveling first-class to the hereafter.

To each his own demise. I can appreciate the basic wisdom of Eddy's travel logic, though. Alaska is Big Country: Colorado on steroids. You can't let it intimidate you. Don't be spooked by tales of campers who get filleted by a grizzly. Don't be cowed by cold air or bug bites. Venture out of your car and off the tour bus. Get dirty. Break a sweat. Indulge your curiosity.

The Kenai Peninsula—know simply as “the Kenai”—couldn't be more user-friendly. It's the abridged version of Alaska: just an hour's drive south of Anchorage, packed with postcard views, seemingly endless riffles of snow-dusted mountains, rivers that roil with spawning salmon, an abundant supply of moose, bears, eagles, and those comical puffins that look to be wearing false noses, four active volcanoes, and one gigantic, otherworldly icefield.

I encountered Eddy the Advice Man five days into my trip. By then I was already immersed in the Kenai's many delights. In fact, I had just spent the day shoehorned into a kayak, silently knifing through frigid Resurrection Bay. Tom Twigg, an architect turned guide, took me and three other novices out for a ten-mile spin. We embarked from a sliver of beach on the outskirts of Seward under a blue, late-summer sky.

The beauty of a kayak isn't portability, but rather its idiot-proof buoyancy. Twigg gave us an orientation on paddle strokes and weight distribution, reminding us of the 50/50 rule for cold-water survival (“The average person has a 50-percent chance of surviving a 50-yard swim”). On that sobering note, we shoved off, Twigg in a solo kayak, the rest of us doubling up.

I hoped that a little low-key kayaking would provide an antidote to the assembly-line adventure I'd experienced the day before, when I cruised the bay on a 150-passenger sightseeing ship. It zipped along at twenty-three knots, looping into a fjord that dead-ended at the glistening lip of Holgate Glacier.
The wall of ancient ice thundered as house-size chunks cleaved off and crashed into the water. Passengers gleefully shouted at the glacier in an attempt to induce even more calving. During the six-hour excursion, cormorants and red-necked phalaropes darted overhead, plump sea lions sunbathed on exposed rocks, and a pod of orcas cavorted in the boat's froth. Splendid sights all, but diminished by the cattle-car viewing conditions. I later learned that this ship had accidentally rammed a humpback whale a few months earlier.

Now, skimming around at sea-lion level, I felt sprung from a cage. In kayaks, we were part of the actual show of the bay, not gawkers holding admission tickets. Horned puffins gaped from nooks in the cliffs we paddled under, tucked tight in their holes like letters in post-office boxes. Bald eagles lazed overhead—they seem as common as crows here—riding the thermals and oozing majesty.

Twigg led us up a side creek that was barely knee deep, yet running heavy with pink and chum salmon. Hundreds of them, hyperkinetic as jumping beans, wiggled beneath us, driven by the strange hormonal explosion that propels them ever onward to spawn and promptly die, their bodies providing food for bears and other forest critters. “Dog” salmon the chum are called, suitable mainly for pet food, since their flesh degrades quickly as they near the coast.

“Once they hit fresh water,” Twigg noted, “salmon are basically living off themselves.”

While the creek reeked of death, life rolled merrily along out in the open bay. As we headed back at day's end, a lone sea otter did a slow float about thirty feet ahead of us. He was munching clams. We could hear the crack of shells breaking against a stone on his belly. Sea otters don't produce blubber; they depend on their thick coats for warmth. To keep the hairs from matting and losing insulation, they groom constantly and
execute barrel roll after barrel roll.

“Sea otters and kayaks have played a big role in Alaska,” Twigg said, as we fought a slight headwind and our escort kept easy pace, snacking away. “The Russians basically enslaved the Natives into hunting otters.” After Vitus Bering's voyage of discovery in 1741, the Chinese developed an insatiable appetite for otter fur. Overhunted in the Kenai, sea otters have since recovered and are as valuable today as they once were, not for fur, but for Alaska's tourism industry. That brings its own threats. At Seward, the marina has swelled to 550 slips and now accommodates jumbo cruise ships. With more traffic on the bay, veteran guides admit it's getting harder to find wildlife.

I dodge big tourism by begging off Seward's renovated Best Western in favor of the Van Gilder Hotel, a Victorian-era remnant listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Instead of cable TV and in-room coffee, the Van Gilder offers a walk-up room with antique furniture and lots of character. I half expect to look out my window and see gas lamps lighting the way for sourdoughs as they stagger out of honky-tonk saloons.

Don Nelson, who gave up wildcatting on the North Slope ten years ago and opened the hotel with his wife, says the new breed of cruise-ship tourists are apt to hop on a day-trip charter bus to Denali as soon as they hit shore. “It isn't like before,” he says. “They used to rent a car and go off exploring.”

I have done my own exploring by driving here from Anchorage via Portage Glacier, then down seventy-five miles of highway through a flume of mountains. Portage Glacier is one of Alaska's top attractions, but more because of its proximity to Anchorage than any inherent grandeur. Exit Glacier, near Seward, has the knee-buckling grandeur.

I pull into the parking lot of Exit Glacier on a drizzly
morning. The sun is straining to bust through the cloud cover—a “sucker hole,” as local pilots call such tantalizing breaks in bad weather. Two short loop trails go to the base of the glacier; another winds four miles uphill. The latter parallels this protruding tongue of the Harding Icefield, a frozen desert that straddles Kenai Fjords National Park and Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. It sprawls over 700 square miles, blanketing the lower Kenai halfway to Homer.

I place my bets on the icefield trail, and it turns out to be a lucky day for suckers. The clouds lift. The panoramic views pull into focus. I've hit the hiking jackpot. The trail climbs through thickets of cottonwood and alder, then through clusters of red salmonberry and pink fireweed. Up and up. Subalpine meadow surrenders to alpine tundra. I bump into Don and Debbie Muggli, a Seattle-area couple who gave themselves an Alaska vacation as a twenty-fifth-anniversary present. Don's a hunter and bear buff. He points toward a sunny patch of green on the opposite mountainside, about a half mile away.