Saginaw Channel & Point Retreat

Today embodied the ideal: when traveling on the National Geographic Sea Lion, we make wildlife and great experiences a priority. We are adaptable enough to adjust our plans when a possibility presents itself, and that is what we did today. We were rewarded with a fantastic day.

Last night we steamed all night to travel from Frederick Sound to Saginaw Channel, near the northern tip of Admiralty Island. Whales had been sighted engaging in some very interesting behavior in the area, and we wanted to see it for ourselves. We sought humpback whales in the mist, meandering the waterways to check out each sighting.

Just after breakfast, three blows were seen, and once again we headed their way. A humpback breathing is an impressive sight, a massive body surfacing to expel a big misty blow, but that alone was not what we had come to see. Then, like magic, it happened: our three were joined by other whales, cruising in from many directions, until there was a group that numbered ten or more swimming together. They dove, one by one, lifting their tails to slip below the surface, and we waited. We watched the birds flying and peering down at the water, to help us know where to look. Suddenly, the sea erupted in a mountain of whales, giant mouths agape, all of them as close together as it is possible for forty ton animals to get.

Cooperative bubblenet feeding! This is the most spectacular of humpback whale behaviors. We gasped and whooped while camera shutters clicked. Soon we got the rhythm of this wildlife event. The whales would breathe a few times, milling around each other, then show their flukes as they made deeper dives.

We imagined them down there, setting up, the majority deep below a school of small fish, the bubble-maker swimming in a slow circle releasing a delicately controlled curtain of bubbles to encircle their prey, the “caller” sounding a high pitched cry to frighten herring and perhaps coordinate the timing of its fellows, and then, each whale taking its position and charging up, inside the bubble net, crashing against the sky with mouths bulging with fish and sea water.

Sometimes we could see the roofs of their mouths, pink palates and fringing baleen. They did it again and again, and for these precious hours, blubber and baleen and giant bumpy heads became beautiful.

Admiralty Island is a vast wilderness island, preserved as a National Monument and not normally available for us to visit. The northern tip of the island, 1500 acres worth, is leased to the nonprofit Alaska Lighthouse Association. It is a magnificent reserve which includes beaches, old growth forest, muskeg and fen as well as the historic grounds and structures of the Point Retreat Lighthouse. Through a personal connection of one of the staff and with the generous invitation of the lighthouse keepers, today we were able to visit this reserve.

Restoration is ongoing, and the area is not normally open to visitors. In fact, we were the first group of our size to go there. We made zodiac landings on a rocky beach and climbed the bluff to join a gentle trail that led to the lighthouse, where we were met by Laurie and Dave Benton, our hosts. They spend most of their time at this remote and scenic spot and are largely responsible for the tremendous amount of restoration work that has been done since the land was leased in 1997, following more than thirty years during which the site was uninhabited (except by bears and other animals) and only the light itself was maintained.

Dave gave us a brief history of the Point Retreat Light, which was first established as a navigational light in 1904 and built in its current classic form in 1923-24. We stood on the lawn near the clapboard lightkeeper’s house, also built in 1923 and in the process of being lovingly restored, and listened to stories of life on the Point, his own stories and the stories from the past.

We went in the lighthouse building, understanding better why the walls are four feet of reinforced concrete thick after hearing about 100+mph winds, ice-coating seawater blowing winter storms. Many climbed the narrow spiral metal staircase – three people at a time – to touch the light and gaze through windows at seascape below. We looked at the workshop, played with Barlow the dog, and watched as hummingbirds visited the natural hedge of fireweed blooms that ring the lighthouse grounds.

A walk in the rainforest completed our visit. Our footfalls were quiet on the soft spruce-needle-strewn trail as we made our way under tall trees between blueberry and skunk cabbage, finding wildflowers and lichens, mushrooms and mosses and the old bones of a winter killed deer. Signs of Admiralty Island’s abundant animal life were present: the completely bare skeleton of a fish far back in the trees (dropped by an eagle? finished off by a mink? cleaned by a shrew?), the prints and scat of deer, homes of squirrels with their spruce-cone middens, the tracks and scat of bear.

At an open meadow called a fen we turned toward home, and just as we finished our walk an eagle and a raven both called out, overhead, marking the end of our exploration with punctuation appropriate to this ancient home of the Tlingit, Eagles and Ravens all, in the place they call Kootznahoo, the Fortress of the Bears.