Ideal Inlet, Petersburg
Alaska’s Inside Passage is a realm of dynamic weather. Any traveler or resident can experience a wealth of northern moods during the summer months as changeable as an ill-tempered cat. Sunshine and warm breezes, or gray and overcast with brisk winds, will come and go with ease and unpredictability. However, one inclement aspect will dominate, and has since time immemorial – rain.
Like a baking white-not sun blanketing and defining a desert landscape, precipitation is the lifeblood of Southeast Alaska’s ecosystem; it is central to every aspect of its makeup and appearance. Spend just a few days anywhere along its length and the likelihood of getting wet is as sure as the sun rising in the east. The steady drizzle that began to fall during the night, wetting the decks and causing the bilges to rise, should have come as no surprise to the initiated or studious. The only question – would it stop or at least abate?
Such a query, though, is foolish thought for those on an adventure of limited duration. Time pondered is time lost. The still air around the National Geographic Sea Lion, coupled with the seemingly unmoving heavy blanket of gray above, would have let any of us know that wishful thinking for sunnier skies was an ill-advised use of one’s faculties. Don the Gore-Tex and rubber boots. It was time to get off the ship and explore the interior of the temperate rain forest that is the face of Southeast Alaska.
During the early morning hours our vessel had anchored in Ideal Inlet on the southeast coast of Kupreanof Island, dead central in the Alaskan portion of the Inside Passage. Though Southeast Alaska’s ecosystem is relatively consistent in appearance, upon closer inspection, variations (some subtle, others more pronounced) reveal themselves. Ice and rainforest, white and green, define this place, but they have their latitudinal and altitudinal distributions. The previous day we were in the realm of the sea level glacier and would be again later during our sojourn. However, having moved south during the night we were now on the southern edge of the zone where rivers of ice and the sea meet.
Kupreanof Island is directly across from Leconte Glacier on the mainland – North America’s most southerly tidewater glacier. Petersburg’s early fisherman used its ice to conveniently chill their fish. Some small icebergs were conspicuous just across the southern reaches of Frederick Sound to the east from our anchorage. The waters were mirror calm, the winds non-existent, and a steady light rain continued to fall as we took Zodiacs ashore to a rocky beach at low tide.
The shoreline was a tricky stretch to negotiate as exposed algae, rocks festooned with barnacles and mussels, and boot-sucking mud presented an array of obstacles to cross. Once through the intertidal gauntlet and safely marshaled on the forest’s grassy edge, we split into walking groups of varying ability and disappeared into the thick, verdant cover of Kupreanof Island’s interior.
Southeast Alaska is covered in large portion by western hemlock and Sitka spruce. Other tree species abound, but these two comprise the bulk of larger tree foliage. The area is also roughly covered ten percent by Muskeg or what the Scandinavians who settled here called blanket bog, a layer cake of impervious glacial till at the bottom, partially decomposed mucky peat, Sphagnum peat, and then live Sphagnum moss, water, and specialized acidic soil-tolerant vegetation as the icing. From forest to bog our hikes would cover some 2-3 miles roundtrip, and in so doing take in a generous slice of Southeast Alaska’s considerable floral array.
The hikes were gentle and entirely on a boardwalk constructed to minimize human impact. From the impressive canopy of spruce and hemlock whose floor was covered in an array of berry shrubs, ferns, mosses, and small wildflowers (among others) we eventually emerged into a clearing of waterlogged muskeg surrounding a lake. Here a new evergreen, not seen within the forest slightly lower down, dominated the landscape – the shore pine. Tolerant of the tannic soil, its members maintain a somewhat tenuous toehold amid the bog orchids, chocolate lilies, grasses, and sedges (to name a few) that formed a carpet from which the stunted and widely-spaced individual trees seemed to spring. Life for such specimens here is not easy, but they manage, lending an air of banzai construction to a field where, when one looks up, one sees far more sky than treetops.
While ashore, Dr. Fred Sharpe, a humpback whale biologist with the Alaska Whale Foundation, came aboard to offer a special presentation on the aquatic denizens that only yesterday held us rapt for just under an hour, repeatedly diving and surfacing in an exercise of sub-surface feeding. Relying on his 23 years of experience with these animals, he took us on a virtual journey of their physiology, life cycles, and most interestingly, behavioral speculation. Through Powerpoint and revolutionary Crittercam video developed by National Geographic Society engineers, he also primed us for one of the most extraordinary examples of animal cooperation – bubble net feeding, an act we were hoping to encounter in the coming days.
As the rain lightened but continued to fall the National Geographic Sea Lion came alongside in Petersburg. Time here was our own. Entirely Southeast Alaskan in makeup and enterprise but Scandinavian in flavor, the town offered much to peruse and discover. Some biked through its streets, others walked, and a few decided to hike once again through a different muskeg environment just across the water from town.
Evening held a surprise treat. Dungeness crabs that only hours before were crawling along the sea bottom had found their way into our galley’s pots. The dining room this night was not only a destination for culinary satisfaction but a stage upon which experienced crab eaters and neophyte crustacean crackers together plied their skills in a community theater-level play of varying dramatic abilities. The feast was as entertaining to watch as it was tasty to eat.
