Travelers' Tales Alaska

by Bill Sherwonit

  “There are two bears up there,” he says. “Any meadow like that, they dink around up there.”

  I get out my binoculars. Sure enough. Two black bears are on their hind legs, locked in playful embrace. Dinking around. Don figures they’re yearlings, since they don’t have the baggy coats of adult males.

  “They haven’t got a care in the world,” he adds. “Who’s gonna bother them up there?”

  Of course, the same could be said of us. As long as those dancing bears stay across the valley, who’s gonna bother us up here? Not the pudgy marmots scurrying in and out of trailside burrows. Not the magpies swooping above. Certainly not those fuzz-ball mountain goats that I can occasionally glimpse sunning on an unreachable rocky perch.

  It’s three and a half more hours of hiking to where the trail tops out at about 3,100 feet in a moonscape of ice and rock. Harding Icefield appears to have no bounds. The whiteness unrolls like a carpet over the horizon. Earlier I met a ranger, Doug Lowthian, whose small 1996 expedition tried to cross the icefield in midwinter. A seven-day snow squall forced them to give up, and Lowthian huddled inside his tent reading a French allegorical novel over and over for three days, until they decided to brave the storm. “It was a very intense wilderness experience,” he said.

  “Intense” is how things can get in Alaska. It’s wise, therefore, to assess your coping skills honestly. The tale goes around about a pilot who once dropped a hunter deep in the bush. The man insisted he knew the ways of the wild. He had his gun, his food, and his pepper spray to fend off bears. The pilot took off. Looking back, he was flabbergasted to see the guy squirting pepper spray all over himself as if it were insect repellent. He collapsed in a twitching heap. The pilot returned, loaded the “hunter” on the plane, and hauled him back to civilization, where he belonged.

  The slang word cheechako is the Alaskan term for the tinhorn like that, however apocryphal. So as I drive Sterling Highway across the midsection of the peninsula, I resist any temptation to pass myself off as a fisherman. This part of Alaska is arguably the angling capital of the world. During high season, people “combat fish” shoulder-to-shoulder for miles along the banks. I pull into a boat launch site near the flyspeck town of Cooper Landing, on the Kenai River. Guide Josh Dougherty is tying lures on three clients’ poles, making ready for departure. It’s the tail end of a slower-than-usual coho salmon run. I ask what it’s like in the height of summer, when sockeye fever strikes and fishhooks are flying.

  “It’s a good place to get pierced,” Dougherty says. “That’s why we go out in a boat.”

  I opt for a raft, though not for fishing. There’s an adventure travel company just upstream that offers twilight rides on the river. I join five other customers; Vickie Burton, a British investment banker turned guide, takes the oars. “Will we see any bears?” everyone asks her. We see pine martens, silver salmon, bald eagles, Dall sheep in distant hills, and an abandoned miner’s cabin. No bears.

  “I understand they saw a bear earlier today,” Burton says cheerily.

  Sure. The ol’ saw-’em-earlier-in-the-day line. We beach the raft after a three-hour glide and start unloading our gear. Suddenly, there they are: three brown bears—a mother and two cubs—fishing directly across the river. They stare intently at the rippling water, swipe a paw at some target, and as often as not snare a wriggling salmon. All three bears appear to be well over this year’s one-coho limit.

  The Kenai River’s record-holding salmon is a 97-pound, 4-ounce king caught in 1985. Your chances of catching a trophy fish are reasonable, but so are your chances of catching a hook in the arm or leg, given the “combat fishing” crowds. The hospital in Soldotna displays a stuffed fisherman dummy decorated with hooks extracted from unlucky anglers who ended up in the emergency room.

  —Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Most of my Kenai trip is pure improvisation. When I spot an inviting trailhead, I take a solo hike, clapping and hooting like a madman to scare off nosy bears. I like the looks of the log cabin restaurant at Gwin’s Lodge, have lunch on a whim, and am rewarded with a terrific home-cooked meal. Gwin’s rhubarb pie is so good that I want to take the crust home and have it mounted, Alaskan big-game style.

  The Kenai Peninsula is a haven for big game, but it wasn’t always so. At the turn of the century, one hunter noted that “there are so many sportsmen now coming in that the large game is suffering quite a slaughter.” In 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Kenai National Moose Range—later expanded to 2 million acres and renamed the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Managing the land for moose has benefited other animals as well. Wolves, formerly eliminated from the Kenai, have returned and now number about 200 animals. Caribou, also wiped out a century ago, have been reintroduced and now migrate across the Kenai in four distinct herds.

  —Andromeda Romano-Lax

  The highlight of my swing through the town of Kenai is driving down Broad Street and having to stop for three moose noshing on shrubs by a drive-in bank. I could bag them with a weed whacker. At the nearby visitors center I learn that 7,000 moose roam the peninsula. I also see the black sea otter cape that Miss Kenai wore in a 1967 beauty pageant.

  Local museums are troves of such curios—an unsung joy of travel. On reaching Homer, therefore, I zeroed in on the Pratt Museum. It has a fine collection of whaling, mining, and Native-culture artifacts. The exhibit on the Exxon oil spill of 1989 includes tapes of radio transmissions and an account of the cleanup of 11 million gallons of oil—enough, refined, to fill the average car’s gas tank once a week for 15,800 years.

  Homer is the artsy-craftsy cultural hub of the Kenai. The houses are cute, the art galleries plentiful. (Seward, by contrast, bills itself “the real Alaska.”) Out on Homer’s 4.5-mile-long harbor spit, you can sip espresso after charter-boat fishing for halibut.

  Homer has everything going for it except convenience. All the real-deal mountains, lakes, and glaciers lie across Kachemak Bay. There is no road. You’re at the mercy of bush pilots and ferry schedules.

  A day trip by ferry to Halibut Cove—a quaint, self-governing community of artists and rugged homesteaders—is as de rigueur as hoisting a beer at the Salty Dawg Saloon. I’m lucky—retired state legislator Clem Tillion is at the helm. Tillion, age seventy-two, keeps sticking his head out of the wheelhouse to offer a running commentary on everything from the Gull Island bird rookery to the origins of glacier names. His wife, Diana, it seems, has mastered the art of painting landscapes with octopus ink.

  When the ferry docks at Halibut Cove, passengers flock to her gallery. Meanwhile, I go have a cup of tea with Clem in the stately bayside house he built by hand. A shotgun rests on the piano in the foyer. Life is good at Halibut Cove, he says, but there’s no sewer system, no school, and no grocery. His granddaughter died in a house fire some years ago. There was no hook and ladder to rescue her.

  “After dinner don’t forget to check the bioluminescence in the water.”

  Diana McBride issues that reminder as we twelve guests—a full house at Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge—dive into our nori-wrapped halibut with wasabi cream sauce. In 1969 Diane and her husband, Mike, boated over from Homer to this uninhabited, undeveloped peninsula. Twenty-nine years, one main lodge, and six satellite cabins (with sauna, solarium, and hot tub) later, they’re still infatuated by their surroundings.

  “There’s so much stuff going on in this estuary,” Mike exclaims as we move on to the summer berry cheesecake. “The water is just full of life.”

  The next morning he leads us on a low-tide walking tour of his beloved mudflats. It’s like stepping into a nature movie, with McBride as narrator. All that we are oblivious to, he sees. An octopus’s tunnel in the mud: “He’s like a beaver. He’s actually sitting in a pool of water down there.” The thumbnail-size limpets that cling to jagged rocks: “These guys are little grazing animals. You can think of them as cows.” A tangle of bull kelp: “Fastest growing plant in the world. This stuff can grow an inch an hour.�
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  The McBrides have created a marvelous resort-cum-classroom. Mike is resident professor. A passionate polymath, he’s on the board of the Smithsonian Institution and an elected fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. He’s also a one-time bush pilot, deep-sea fisherman, and commercial abalone diver. With his survival skills, he could probably fashion an emergency shelter out of dust balls.

  “This is a powerful place,” Mike says of Kachemak Bay. “It’s in the soles of my feet.”

  Chris Day feels the power, too. She’s a naturalist from Homer who frequently takes McBride’s guests on fly-hikes into the remote alpine zone of Kachemak Bay State Park. She and I spend an afternoon exploring Kinnickinnick Lake. It’s another nature movie. Day points out the white reindeer moss and bright red bearberry that I’d normally stomp by. She examines the digested seeds in a splat of bear scat, then picks a willow-rose leaf and peels back the layers to show me where a wasp deposited its larvae for safekeeping.

  “There’s lots of neat country that people could get into,” Day says, “but they don’t know much about it, and they’re afraid of it.”

  We scramble around the periphery of Doroshin Glacier for four hours. Like Eddy the Advice Man, Day is a big fan of grizzly bears. She thinks they’re misunderstood and unjustly maligned. We don’t encounter any on our hike, so I miss my chance to get elevated to a higher plane. All’s not lost, though, as Day reminds me while we soak up the vista.

  “You could be the first or last person on Earth in a place like this,” she says. “It’s a real good feeling.”

  Tom Dunkel is a contributing editor for National Geographic Traveler. He lives in Washington, D. C.

  STEVE HOWE

  Hell Can’t Be Worse Than This Trail

  One century later, a steep route to the gold fields still tries men’s souls.

  THE SNOW-FILLED GULLY REARS 500 FEET BETWEEN granite buttresses, thrusting into a ceiling of clouds that hides the pass above. Halfway up, I turn around to face the approaching storm. The air is thick and sits cold and heavy in my lungs. Each breath comes hard, like sucking air through wet wool. Fog roars upward through the pass, soaking every windward surface and tinting the crags a hazy monochrome reminiscent of turn-of-the-century photographs. Meteorological mayhem and human epics have long been part of crossing the Chilkoot Pass—the infamous weather caused by its location (it sits between the moist Gulf of Alaska and the frigid Canadian “Interior”), the insane human history resulting from gold fever.

  For nine months, from September 1897 to May 1898, roughly 25,000 aspiring prospectors stampeded through this slot, chasing dreams of instant wealth they thought waited along Canada’s Klondike River. The thirty-three-mile trail from the Gulf of Alaska at Dyea Inlet over Chilkoot Pass to Lake Bennett at the headwaters of the Yukon River became a tumbling tent city of supply dumps, saloons, bunkhouses, whorehouses, and casinos. Stampeders who couldn’t hire professional packers traversed each foot of the route thirty to forty times, ferrying the year’s worth of supplies the Canadian Mounties required for entrance to the Yukon Territory.

  The Klondike gold seekers who traveled the Chilkoot Trail bore little semblance to the frontiersmen mythologized in the novels of Robert Service and Jack London. They were raw beginners at wilderness travel, hence the epic tales. But what they lacked in experience, these dreamers made up for in optimism; they called this particular segment of trail that I’m hiking the “Golden Stairs.” There had been gold rushes throughout the 1800s—to California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, British Columbia, South Africa, and Australia—but nothing as large or frantic as the Klondike Stampede.…

  I had a brief, rose-colored vision of one of those tough, surly Tlingit packers who hired themselves out to the Klondike stampeders to pack goods over the pass, who were known to sit down in the middle of the trail on strike for better wages, usually just before the summit. The Scales got its name because this was where the packers would reweigh their loads and jack up their prices.

  Whatever they charged, it wasn’t enough.

  —Dana Stabenow,

  “A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail”

  As I prepare to start out on the Chilkoot Trail, I look around at the tidal flats at Dyea, which bear little trace of the madness that occurred here almost a century ago. Only puffins and sea lions populate the once-hectic estuary of the Taiya River. Despite this tranquility, at certain times the Chilkoot Trail is hardly a reclusive wilderness experience. Each July and August an average of 3,000 people backpack across the pass, following in the footsteps of the stampeders through Klondike Gold Rush International Historic Park, often referred to as “the world’s longest museum.”

  As I check my pack contents one more time, I think about the gold seekers who hastily unloaded their supplies at Dyea Cove and Skagway Bay, about ten miles south, in early August 1897. The horses, skillets, axes, and food needed to survive the trip to the gold fields were dumped off the boats onto tidal mud flats. Thirty-foot tides claimed many of the beached outfits before the supplies could be moved to higher ground, and for months, knots of sobbing men lined the shore. Naturalist John Muir witnessed the chaotic scene and likened it to “a nest of ants taken into a strange country and stirred up by a stick.”

  The track before me plunges into a lush coastal rain forest of birch, poplar, spruce, and fir. Thick banks of dryopteris ferns and broad-leaved devil’s club wall the trail as it winds past still, mirrored flood channels of the Taiya River. Common mergansers float beneath the first footbridge, nine downy hatchlings bunched around their mother’s tail, each one perfect as a dandelion ball. Black bear scat is common and full of lush spring grasses.

  Faint relics of the gold-rush insanity litter the Chilkoot today. Old beams, telegraph wires, and rusted flywheels are scattered amid the white flowers growing throughout the forest understory. Tall conifers appear, draped in green tendrils of blyoria lichen. The trail enters a glade at the confluence of the Taiya and Nourse rivers. A tent town called Canyon City sprang up here during the rush, only to disappear again when a railroad was completed over White Pass—a competing parallel route to the Yukon—in late 1899. Served by a blacksmith shop, several restaurants, and saloons, the population topped out at around 6,000.

  Crossing the river on a suspension bridge, I find a large rusted steam boiler tucked among the firs and poplars. It helped power the most sophisticated of four tramways that creaked over the Golden Stairs by spring 1898. This one ran seven miles over the pass and contained the longest cable span in the world: 2,200 feet between towers. During its brief career, the tram pumped cargo into the Yukon at the rate of nine tons an hour—for those with the money.

  The stampeders were a different breed from the experienced sourdoughs who initially struck pay dirt and triggered the rush. “They come from desks and counters; have never packed, and are not even accustomed to hard labour,” wrote Tappan Adney, a correspondent for Harper’s Illustrated Weekly. One veteran miner looked over the assemblage and shook his head. “They have no more idea what they are going to than that horse has.”

  No one who started out from the coast later than September 1897 could reach and float the Yukon River before freeze-up. Some gold seekers gave up, but most dug in and began relaying loads up and over Chilkoot Pass through the howling Alaskan winter, planning to have their outfit moved and their boats built when the frozen Yukon River broke apart in spring. The usual method was to haul the entire gear pile slowly up the pass in five-mile stages, moving about sixty-five pounds per trip.

  The trail leaves Canyon City, climbing steeply past vistas of the rugged Nourse River drainage, with its ripsaw skyline and crenelated glaciers. I wander slowly up through the dark, shadowed forest and drift into Pleasant Camp at dusk, glad to find the site unoccupied. After the gloom of the Taiya Canyon, this open river-front camp must have impressed the stampeders—as it does me—with its pastoral charm. All night, meteorites streak across Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

  As autu
mn gave way to winter in 1897, the Chilkoot Trail swelled with struggling packers, staggering horses, and howling dogs. Mixed in among the gold-crazed men were con artists, card sharks, and outlaws. Good bunco artists could make $2,000 a day. Shell games sprang up next to campfires, and the dark of night was particularly dangerous. Sunrise often revealed corpses along more remote portions of the trail, their pants pockets turned inside out.

  My own dawn is more tranquil, marked by low clouds turning to rain. I dawdle the morning away, then strike out on the wet and squishy trail, its fern banks glistening. At Sheep Camp the terrain opens, offering views up through scrubby alders to a huge, convex shield of granite, stippled with snow and stunted trees. The pass itself remains hidden behind clouds.

  Sheep Camp offered the last flat ground, shelter, and firewood before the pass. A traditional stopping place for Indian packers and mountain goat hunters, it mutated overnight into a stampede city of 4,000, and bad weather in the pass occasionally swelled its numbers to 8,000. Sheep Camp was the limit of livestock travel on the Chilkoot, and many prospectors simply abandoned horses or dogs here. Injured and starving animals wandered through the camps until the harried miners shot them by the hundreds and dumped them in the Taiya. Pneumonia and dysentery raged up and down the Chilkoot. One night there were seventeen spinal meningitis deaths in Sheep Camp alone.

  A red-headed woodpecker busily forages on a poplar, hopping in a counterclockwise spiral up the trunk. Foaming cascades roar down the surrounding cliffs, braiding and sheeting over the rocks in a violent staircase effect. I come across Upper Sheep Camp Shelter, a log cabin with wood stove, table, and logbook. The entries are an amusing counterpoint to the grimness that occurred here years before: “This golf bag’s getting filled with rainwater.” “Beautiful trail! Now if I could just get this stinking Julie Andrews song out of my head.” Then the words of a twelve-year-old boy from Calgary stop me cold: “The stampeders climbed the pass with thoughts of striking it rich. So why do we do it?”