Kelp Bay and Red Bluff Bay, Baranof Island
Discovery of life and beauty in unexpected places is one of the wonders of travel. In the illuminating shafts of light hitting the understory of the forest where we walked, in the dark green silky waters we kayaked, and in the space between, we found treasures of life this morning in Kelp Bay.
Where enchanted rainforest meets productive seas there lies a netherland of life. Driven by lunar trajectories, seawater sweeps rhythmically across this organically banded margin, twice daily exposing and submerging a cornucopia of hidden creatures living life on the edge. (Alaska’s convoluted coastlines can experience tide ranges over 20 feet.)
Probing the intertidal, we uncovered beautifully improbable invertebrate forms. Representing the spiny-skinned echinoderms were sunflower sea stars, ochre stars, spiny urchins and sea cucumbers. It was wonderful to feel the slow wriggling tubefeet of these bizarre animals in our hands. Hermit crabs overstuffed into mollusk shells, eel-like gunnels trapped between rocks, feathery-tentacled cucumbers vertical in the mud, limpets adhering to live crabs and other wonderful organisms complimented the intertidal menagerie.
Meanwhile, kayaks and Zodiacs traveled glassy waters where eagles, mink, salmon, seals and a mother humpback tending her calf were discovered. In the lumpy mossforest of Kelp Bay’s Pond Island, hikers found a vibrant green world adorned with pink orchids, red squirrels, and yellow pond lilies, as well as hummingbirds, hermit thrushes and beaver handiwork.
The icy snow-caked summits of Baranof Island’s interior beckoned in the clear weather and massive resultant waterfalls plunged into the channel we traveled to our afternoon destination. Red Bluff Bay is a beautiful slotted haven off wide Chatham Strait named for the rusty ultramafic chromium cliffs at its entrance. Inside we rode Zodiacs dwarfed by near vertical walls, toeholding rainforest, tree-slide swaths and an enormous waterfall that staircased through forested flanks. The sinuous bay terminated in a meadow and river backdropped by towering granitic thumbs holding back cloudbanks and spotlighting the sun’s rays into a near-religious scene.
The sensual landscape was highlighted by its wild occupants. We observed the behavior of a bald eagle family through the afternoon, watching a little eaglet and its parents on the prominent nest near our ship’s anchorage. An adolescent brown bear grazed the shore and another moved through grass in the dramatic meadow. A mother-pup harbor seal pair hauled up out of the water on a stranded tree, their silhouetted forms rising in the falling tide.
With the sun gods on our side for the third day running, the Sea Lion explored two bays glacially cut from Baranof Island’s eastern flanks, discovering life and beauty in diverse adjacent habitats.
