Yet more Alaska
2005-09-01 02:00:17.51925+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments
Even in Petersburg, a town that rightfully thinks
fairly highly of itself, a question we got asked on our trip was "why
Petersburg?".
Charlene said "I want to go to Alaska". I'd been planning a road trip up through Grand Teton and Yellowstone, but I re-targeted my research a bit, and discovered that Alaska's a pretty huge place. I had visions of everything from glaciers and the Inside Passage to Denali and Prince William Sound. Clearly this wasn't going to happen in one week. So I asked "why?", and she said "I want to see whales".
The coolest whales to see are humpbacks. They're more "whale like" than orcas, but still play more on (and above) the surface a lot. In winter they're found out by Hawaii and points west, but in summer the largest concentrations are in Frederick Sound.
The big cruise ships don't go to into Frederick
Sound. The passage at the south end is either through Wrangell
Narrows, which passes the larger of the Alaska Marine Highway
boats with only a hundred feet to spare at some points and involves
some huge number of course changes, or through "Dry Strait", which,
you can tell from its name, is a place that even in a skiff you need
to check the tide tables.
We looked at the high end cruise ships that get in some of the out of the way places, but discovered that same "trying to see too much" feel. As well, the price difference between the premium cruise ships with 75 to a few hundred people and a 50-70 foot yacht with 4 or 6 passengers is smaller than you'd think. So when our attempts to schedule a week with Alaska Passages (one such small charter operator) didn't work out, we looked to doing a land based trip.
Once we prioritized, we wanted at least two days of
whale watching, and we wanted serious days, not two hours of jetboat
thrill ride, and some classically Alaska scenery, Petersburg was the
obvious choice: It sits at the base of Frederick Sound, close to the
whales; it has a solid fishing economy so we were less likely to be
overrun with Pier 39 style gift shops and more likely to get into
discussions with authentic locals (that sounds patronizing, I don't
mean it to be); it's right near Le Conte glacier, lots of icebergs and
such; and it has regularly scheduled airline service, so it's easy to
get to.
One of the things we missed when we wandered out to
this park was the few thousand year old remains of fish traps that are
said to be visible at a minus tide. We got distracted by cool stuff in
the low tide muck:
The parts that aren't saltwater or mountainside
leading directly to mile plus peaks are fields of glacier silt called
"muskeg". The soil is acidic and very wet, and the plants which grow
in it are interesting. The trees supposedly have a very hard and dense
wood, when they can get enough nutrient to stand up straight, and
fallen trees make a rich soil, other trees grow straight up out of the
supine trunks.
In our later trip to Glacier Garden we saw some trees with exposed roots that we asked about, and were told that this was what happened when the host log had rotted away, as in:
