Travelers' Tales Alaska (15 page)

“There are two bears up there,” he says. “Any meadow like that, they dink around up there.”

I get out my binoculars. Sure enough. Two black bears are on their hind legs, locked in playful embrace. Dinking around. Don figures they're yearlings, since they don't have the baggy coats of adult males.

“They haven't got a care in the world,” he adds. “Who's gonna bother them up there?”

Of course, the same could be said of us. As long as those dancing bears stay across the valley, who's gonna bother us up here? Not the pudgy marmots scurrying in and out of trailside burrows. Not the magpies swooping above. Certainly not those fuzz-ball mountain goats that I can occasionally glimpse sunning on an unreachable rocky perch.

It's three and a half more hours of hiking to where the trail
tops out at about 3,100 feet in a moonscape of ice and rock. Harding Icefield appears to have no bounds. The whiteness unrolls like a carpet over the horizon. Earlier I met a ranger, Doug Lowthian, whose small 1996 expedition tried to cross the icefield in midwinter. A seven-day snow squall forced them to give up, and Lowthian huddled inside his tent reading a French allegorical novel over and over for three days, until they decided to brave the storm. “It was a very intense wilderness experience,” he said.

“Intense” is how things can get in Alaska. It's wise, therefore, to assess your coping skills honestly. The tale goes around about a pilot who once dropped a hunter deep in the bush. The man insisted he knew the ways of the wild. He had his gun, his food, and his pepper spray to fend off bears. The pilot took off. Looking back, he was flabbergasted to see the guy squirting pepper spray all over himself as if it were insect repellent. He collapsed in a twitching heap. The pilot returned, loaded the “hunter” on the plane, and hauled him back to civilization, where he belonged.

The slang word
cheechako
is the Alaskan term for the tinhorn like that, however apocryphal. So as I drive Sterling Highway across the midsection of the peninsula, I resist any temptation to pass myself off as a fisherman. This part of Alaska is arguably the angling capital of the world. During high season, people “combat fish” shoulder-to-shoulder for miles along the banks. I pull into a boat launch site near the flyspeck town of Cooper Landing, on the Kenai River. Guide Josh Dougherty is tying lures on three clients' poles, making ready for departure. It's the tail end of a slower-than-usual coho salmon run. I ask what it's like in the height of summer, when sockeye fever strikes and fishhooks are flying.

“It's a good place to get pierced,” Dougherty says. “That's
why we go out in a boat.”

I opt for a raft, though not for fishing. There's an adventure travel company just upstream that offers twilight rides on the river. I join five other customers; Vickie Burton, a British investment banker turned guide, takes the oars. “Will we see any bears?” everyone asks her. We see pine martens, silver salmon, bald eagles, Dall sheep in distant hills, and an abandoned miner's cabin. No bears.

“I understand they saw a bear earlier today,” Burton says cheerily.

Sure. The ol' saw-'em-earlier-in-the-day line. We beach the raft after a three-hour glide and start unloading our gear. Suddenly, there they are: three brown bears—a mother and two cubs—fishing directly across the river. They stare intently at the rippling water, swipe a paw at some target, and as often as not snare a wriggling salmon. All three bears appear to be well over this year's one-coho limit.

Most of my Kenai trip is pure improvisation. When I spot an inviting trailhead, I take a solo hike, clapping and hooting like a madman to scare off nosy bears. I like the looks of the log cabin restaurant at Gwin's Lodge, have lunch on a whim, and am rewarded with a terrific home-cooked meal. Gwin's
rhubarb pie is so good that I want to take the crust home and have it mounted, Alaskan big-game style.

The highlight of my swing through the town of Kenai is driving down Broad Street and having to stop for three moose noshing on shrubs by a drive-in bank. I could bag them with a weed whacker. At the nearby visitors center I learn that 7,000 moose roam the peninsula. I also see the black sea otter cape that Miss Kenai wore in a 1967 beauty pageant.

Local museums are troves of such curios—an unsung joy of travel. On reaching Homer, therefore, I zeroed in on the Pratt Museum. It has a fine collection of whaling, mining, and Native-culture artifacts. The exhibit on the Exxon oil spill of 1989 includes tapes of radio transmissions and an account of the cleanup of 11 million gallons of oil—enough, refined, to fill the average car's gas tank once a week for 15,800 years.

Homer is the artsy-craftsy cultural hub of the Kenai. The
houses are cute, the art galleries plentiful. (Seward, by contrast, bills itself “the
real
Alaska.”) Out on Homer's 4.5-mile-long harbor spit, you can sip espresso after charter-boat fishing for halibut.

Homer has everything going for it except convenience. All the real-deal mountains, lakes, and glaciers lie across Kachemak Bay. There is no road. You're at the mercy of bush pilots and ferry schedules.

A day trip by ferry to Halibut Cove—a quaint, self-governing community of artists and rugged homesteaders—is as
de rigueur
as hoisting a beer at the Salty Dawg Saloon. I'm lucky—retired state legislator Clem Tillion is at the helm. Tillion, age seventy-two, keeps sticking his head out of the wheelhouse to offer a running commentary on everything from the Gull Island bird rookery to the origins of glacier names. His wife, Diana, it seems, has mastered the art of painting landscapes with octopus ink.

When the ferry docks at Halibut Cove, passengers flock to her gallery. Meanwhile, I go have a cup of tea with Clem in the stately bayside house he built by hand. A shotgun rests on the piano in the foyer. Life is good at Halibut Cove, he says, but there's no sewer system, no school, and no grocery. His granddaughter died in a house fire some years ago. There was no hook and ladder to rescue her.

“After dinner don't forget to check the bioluminescence in the water.”

Diana McBride issues that reminder as we twelve guests—a full house at Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge—dive into our nori-wrapped halibut with wasabi cream sauce. In 1969 Diane and her husband, Mike, boated over from Homer to this uninhabited, undeveloped peninsula. Twenty-nine years, one main lodge, and six satellite cabins (with sauna, solarium, and
hot tub) later, they're still infatuated by their surroundings.

“There's so much stuff going on in this estuary,” Mike exclaims as we move on to the summer berry cheesecake. “The water is just full of life.”

The next morning he leads us on a low-tide walking tour of his beloved mudflats. It's like stepping into a nature movie, with McBride as narrator. All that we are oblivious to, he sees. An octopus's tunnel in the mud: “He's like a beaver. He's actually sitting in a pool of water down there.” The thumbnail-size limpets that cling to jagged rocks: “These guys are little grazing animals. You can think of them as cows.” A tangle of bull kelp: “Fastest growing plant in the world. This stuff can grow an inch an hour.”

The McBrides have created a marvelous resort-cum-classroom. Mike is resident professor. A passionate polymath, he's on the board of the Smithsonian Institution and an elected fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. He's also a one-time bush pilot, deep-sea fisherman, and commercial abalone diver. With his survival skills, he could probably fashion an emergency shelter out of dust balls.

“This is a powerful place,” Mike says of Kachemak Bay. “It's in the soles of my feet.”

Chris Day feels the power, too. She's a naturalist from Homer who frequently takes McBride's guests on fly-hikes into the remote alpine zone of Kachemak Bay State Park. She and I spend an afternoon exploring Kinnickinnick Lake. It's another nature movie. Day points out the white reindeer moss and bright red bearberry that I'd normally stomp by. She examines the digested seeds in a splat of bear scat, then picks a willow-rose leaf and peels back the layers to show me where a wasp deposited its larvae for safekeeping.

“There's lots of neat country that people could get into,”
Day says, “but they don't know much about it, and they're afraid of it.”

We scramble around the periphery of Doroshin Glacier for four hours. Like Eddy the Advice Man, Day is a big fan of grizzly bears. She thinks they're misunderstood and unjustly maligned. We don't encounter any on our hike, so I miss my chance to get elevated to a higher plane. All's not lost, though, as Day reminds me while we soak up the vista.

“You could be the first or last person on Earth in a place like this,” she says. “It's a real good feeling.”

Tom Dunkel is a contributing editor for
National Geographic Traveler.
He lives in Washington, D. C.

STEVE HOWE

One century later, a steep route to the gold fields still tries men's souls.

T
HE SNOW-FILLED GULLY REARS
500
FEET BETWEEN
granite buttresses, thrusting into a ceiling of clouds that hides the pass above. Halfway up, I turn around to face the approaching storm. The air is thick and sits cold and heavy in my lungs. Each breath comes hard, like sucking air through wet wool. Fog roars upward through the pass, soaking every windward surface and tinting the crags a hazy monochrome reminiscent of turn-of-the-century photographs. Meteorological mayhem and human epics have long been part of crossing the Chilkoot Pass—the infamous weather caused by its location (it sits between the moist Gulf of Alaska and the frigid Canadian “Interior”), the insane human history resulting from gold fever.