Freshwater Bay and Lynn Canal, Alaska
Among the many impressions that must strike a first-time visitor to coastal Alaska, the sheer abundance of life in the area must stand out. Everything seems alive here. The tide surges in and out. The rains come and go. The migratory animals and birds arrive and depart. The land is covered in forest, and the forest is covered in mosses and lichens. We witnessed several demonstrations of this prodigious productivity today.
Arriving in Freshwater Bay before breakfast, we were soon anchored in Pavlov Harbor. All around us, salmon leaped from the water, over and over again. They were returning to their birthplace, completing their cycle, and in so doing, bringing the abundant nutrients of the sea to the inner land. We moved along with them, by kayak or on foot, up into a small stream towards a lovely waterfall…and there we found another resident taking advantage of the returning bounty. It was a sizeable brown bear, clearly already well-fed, splashing around and catching a few more fish, maybe just for the fun of it. We stood among the remains of many of his (or other bears’) previous dinners, carcasses that would now go to feed the ravens and fertilize the forest. Eventually he turned and strolled back into the woods, a fat salmon in his mouth.
Above the falls (and the fish ladder constructed there) hikers broke out of the forest and into a wide-open basin, ringed by mountains and filled by a placid lake. In the mouth of it was a floating tent cabin, inhabited by two men engaged in counting returning sockeye and coho salmon—measuring the abundance of the resource. We spoke with them for a while. On their porch hung two Sitka black-tailed deer, gutted and headless, ready for the carving knife. These men knew how to partake of the bounty of the land as well.
The tide was low during our visit, and some walkers stopped to look in tidepools. Acres and acres of barnacles and blue mussels were exposed on the beach of our own little bay. The zone between the tides is a particularly rich ecosystem all its own, and filled with numerous strange life forms: chitons, whelks, sea stars, urchins, clams, and periwinkles, to name a few.
Late in the day, by a strange symmetrical twist of fate, we chanced upon the same group of bubble-net-feeding humpbacks we had seen on Monday. Seeing them on the first and the last days of our voyage, in two separate places, made a nice set of bookends for the trip. Imagine 14 black school buses on end all blasting up out of the sea together, and you’ll have an idea of the spectacle. The sea here produces such concentrations of biomass that these enormous creatures, a thousand strong, are drawn here each year from their South Pacific breeding grounds.
Confronted with such evident abundance, one is tempted to think of these resources as endless—just as we once thought of the buffalo or the passenger pigeon. History tells us clearly: even great abundance needs protecting. But a day like today shows: it’s worth the effort.
Among the many impressions that must strike a first-time visitor to coastal Alaska, the sheer abundance of life in the area must stand out. Everything seems alive here. The tide surges in and out. The rains come and go. The migratory animals and birds arrive and depart. The land is covered in forest, and the forest is covered in mosses and lichens. We witnessed several demonstrations of this prodigious productivity today.
Arriving in Freshwater Bay before breakfast, we were soon anchored in Pavlov Harbor. All around us, salmon leaped from the water, over and over again. They were returning to their birthplace, completing their cycle, and in so doing, bringing the abundant nutrients of the sea to the inner land. We moved along with them, by kayak or on foot, up into a small stream towards a lovely waterfall…and there we found another resident taking advantage of the returning bounty. It was a sizeable brown bear, clearly already well-fed, splashing around and catching a few more fish, maybe just for the fun of it. We stood among the remains of many of his (or other bears’) previous dinners, carcasses that would now go to feed the ravens and fertilize the forest. Eventually he turned and strolled back into the woods, a fat salmon in his mouth.
Above the falls (and the fish ladder constructed there) hikers broke out of the forest and into a wide-open basin, ringed by mountains and filled by a placid lake. In the mouth of it was a floating tent cabin, inhabited by two men engaged in counting returning sockeye and coho salmon—measuring the abundance of the resource. We spoke with them for a while. On their porch hung two Sitka black-tailed deer, gutted and headless, ready for the carving knife. These men knew how to partake of the bounty of the land as well.
The tide was low during our visit, and some walkers stopped to look in tidepools. Acres and acres of barnacles and blue mussels were exposed on the beach of our own little bay. The zone between the tides is a particularly rich ecosystem all its own, and filled with numerous strange life forms: chitons, whelks, sea stars, urchins, clams, and periwinkles, to name a few.
Late in the day, by a strange symmetrical twist of fate, we chanced upon the same group of bubble-net-feeding humpbacks we had seen on Monday. Seeing them on the first and the last days of our voyage, in two separate places, made a nice set of bookends for the trip. Imagine 14 black school buses on end all blasting up out of the sea together, and you’ll have an idea of the spectacle. The sea here produces such concentrations of biomass that these enormous creatures, a thousand strong, are drawn here each year from their South Pacific breeding grounds.
Confronted with such evident abundance, one is tempted to think of these resources as endless—just as we once thought of the buffalo or the passenger pigeon. History tells us clearly: even great abundance needs protecting. But a day like today shows: it’s worth the effort.
