Petersburg and Cascade Creek

Confluence of glacier, forest and salmon helped establish the quaint Alaskan fishing hamlet of Petersburg a century ago. Norweigan Peter Bushmann recognized the usefulness of icebergs from a nearby glacier to keep the abundant fish fresh in a time before refrigeration and used spruce of the rainforest to build a cannery and the town’s buildings. This morning the Sea Lion tied up to a tide-regulating floating dock in this picturesque community of 3,500 Alaskans.

A surreal sunny blue sky day enhanced the island town’s beauty, snowy granitic peaks backgrounding fishing vessels, buildings and rainforest. Several Sea Lion guests ventured into the dreamy Coast Mountains, riding helicopters for a surreal perspective on the icy rivers that have scored the landscape. Moose, bears and seals were seen from on high. About the ship, the two important clan animals of the native Tlingits, ravens and eagles, perched in trees, foraged the intertidal, and engaged in curious antics we observed.

One immature bald eagle with brown and white checkerboard plumage held court on a streetlight just down the dock from the Sea Lion’s berth, perching proudly until it followed an unkindness of ravens into a nearby spruce. Wiser and older eagles sport a dignified white head and tail that immature birds don’t gain until they’re about five years old.

Across the northern end of what some call Christmas Tree Alley, the marker-lit serpentine Wrangell Narrows, hikers disembarked Zodiacs for a tramp through forest and up boardwalk into a unique saturated environment. Sitka black-tailed deer seemed to greet hikers to the boggy muskeg, standing tall close beside the trail. This small mule deer subspecies defies a scientific principle that states that animals grow larger as one moves northward; most Alaskan creatures may be the largest of their kind.

Afternoon found us in a delightful corner of Alaska at Cascade Creek. Here we hiked a Forest Service trail through verdant forest to a raging torrent of water careening through canyon and over falls. An inimitable water ouzel preened on the rocks near a rainbow-generating falls. Back on board the dining room became a scene of civilized carnage as hungry explorers extricated tasty morsels from fresh Dungeness crabs procured earlier in the day at Petersburg.