Ideal Cove & Petersburg, Southeast Alaska
Alaska is to be experienced at different spatial scales. Yesterday in Endicott Arm we saw Alaska at a the grand end of the scale: vertical cliffs rising thousands of feet up from the fjord to peaks still capped with winter’s snow; the Dawes Glacier a mile across and two hundred feet high at its face where the ice completes its journey from mountains to sea. Today we entered the forest for a more intimate experience with the Temperate Rainforest of Southeast Alaska. Our Zodiacs took us from our floating home on the National Geographic Sea Bird to a trailhead at Ideal Cove on Mitkof Island. Here the U.S. Forest Service has provided access to the forest on a boardwalk trail. A few steps in from the beach we were swallowed by the forest; we became a part of it. Entering the forest is a bit like walking into a cathedral, its arched roof of giant hemlock and Sitka spruce towers overhead; green tapestries of shrubs – blueberries, huckleberries, false azalea, and more, each in its own shade of green, cloak the walls; and the richest imaginable carpet of mosses, ferns, lichens, and tiny flowering plants is woven into a complex pattern that covers every available surface. The music of the cathedral is provided by a stream that parallels our trail and by the occasional high, buzzy trills of the varied thrush. We can learn the names of the plants if we so choose and the forest becomes a community of individuals; or we can take it in as a whole that invites the use of all of our senses. Sometimes humans are so dominated by the visual sense that we forget to pay attention to the others, but the forest invokes all of our sensory powers: the sounds, the smells, and even the touch of an occasional raindrop on bare skin – they are all part of the experience.
Our afternoon was spent experiencing Alaska in a very different way as we visited the community of Petersburg. Here the economy is based almost entirely on the bounty of Alaska’s productive seas: wild-caught Alaskan salmon (no farm-raised fish will be here!), halibut and black cod from the ocean depths, herring taken for their roe in spring, Dungeness and king crabs, and more. As we enjoyed Petersburg in several ways the ship’s supply of seafood was replenished to last until its next visit to Petersburg. A walk along the dock let us look closely at Alaskan fishing boats and talk about the management of ocean resources. By and large, Alaska’s commercial fisheries are healthy and well managed, as access to the resource is restricted by fishery quotas. Some of us took advantage of bicycles to pedal through the town and test the old adage (“you never forget …”). Some took the Zodiacs across the water to adjacent Kupreanof Island for another walk through the forest, this one reaching a bog or muskeg habitat with a unique assemblage of low-growing, acid-tolerant bog plants like the insect-devouring sundews and bog blueberry. Many of these plants are so small that they can only be seen on hands and knees, so yet another way of experiencing Alaska was introduced. We returned to the ship just as the sky opened up and the rain that makes this a rainforest came down, but it dampened not a bit our enjoyment of this day in Southeast Alaska.
Alaska is to be experienced at different spatial scales. Yesterday in Endicott Arm we saw Alaska at a the grand end of the scale: vertical cliffs rising thousands of feet up from the fjord to peaks still capped with winter’s snow; the Dawes Glacier a mile across and two hundred feet high at its face where the ice completes its journey from mountains to sea. Today we entered the forest for a more intimate experience with the Temperate Rainforest of Southeast Alaska. Our Zodiacs took us from our floating home on the National Geographic Sea Bird to a trailhead at Ideal Cove on Mitkof Island. Here the U.S. Forest Service has provided access to the forest on a boardwalk trail. A few steps in from the beach we were swallowed by the forest; we became a part of it. Entering the forest is a bit like walking into a cathedral, its arched roof of giant hemlock and Sitka spruce towers overhead; green tapestries of shrubs – blueberries, huckleberries, false azalea, and more, each in its own shade of green, cloak the walls; and the richest imaginable carpet of mosses, ferns, lichens, and tiny flowering plants is woven into a complex pattern that covers every available surface. The music of the cathedral is provided by a stream that parallels our trail and by the occasional high, buzzy trills of the varied thrush. We can learn the names of the plants if we so choose and the forest becomes a community of individuals; or we can take it in as a whole that invites the use of all of our senses. Sometimes humans are so dominated by the visual sense that we forget to pay attention to the others, but the forest invokes all of our sensory powers: the sounds, the smells, and even the touch of an occasional raindrop on bare skin – they are all part of the experience.
Our afternoon was spent experiencing Alaska in a very different way as we visited the community of Petersburg. Here the economy is based almost entirely on the bounty of Alaska’s productive seas: wild-caught Alaskan salmon (no farm-raised fish will be here!), halibut and black cod from the ocean depths, herring taken for their roe in spring, Dungeness and king crabs, and more. As we enjoyed Petersburg in several ways the ship’s supply of seafood was replenished to last until its next visit to Petersburg. A walk along the dock let us look closely at Alaskan fishing boats and talk about the management of ocean resources. By and large, Alaska’s commercial fisheries are healthy and well managed, as access to the resource is restricted by fishery quotas. Some of us took advantage of bicycles to pedal through the town and test the old adage (“you never forget …”). Some took the Zodiacs across the water to adjacent Kupreanof Island for another walk through the forest, this one reaching a bog or muskeg habitat with a unique assemblage of low-growing, acid-tolerant bog plants like the insect-devouring sundews and bog blueberry. Many of these plants are so small that they can only be seen on hands and knees, so yet another way of experiencing Alaska was introduced. We returned to the ship just as the sky opened up and the rain that makes this a rainforest came down, but it dampened not a bit our enjoyment of this day in Southeast Alaska.
