As noted in my last post, we had terrible wildlife viewing luck during our trip to Alaska, but we had an ace up our sleeve. Right before we left for the trip, a friend mentioned two national parks that almost guaranteed a bear sighting – Katmai National Park and/or Lake Clark National Park.
In my ignorance, I started looking at how we could drive to one of these parks and from where, only to discover there is no way to get to either of them without taking a boat or flying. As an aside, Alaska has more pilots per capita than anywhere in the U.S. (and some say the world) as the forbidding geography and dearth of roads – 80% of Alaskan communities are not connected by roads – make flying the only option to get to many places.
By that time, nearly every tour/flight to these parks was booked – one of the downfalls of planning travel to popular places very late in the game. After days of research, I managed to find two seats with a company that had decent reviews, but we had to take an afternoon slot even though that is riskier for weather. In fact, when the day finally arrived, we woke to a rainy, gray morning – not a good sign for a flight over the bay to either park – but the timing ending up working in our favor! Katmai was out for that day overall due to the weather, and the morning tours to Lake Clark were plagued by light rain.
But by 2 pm, when we took off from Homer, the skies were still gray, but clearing, and the rain was gone. A one-hour flight carried us across Kachemak Bay and onto the landmass that contains Lake Clark National Park. There were four of us and a pilot/guide in the tiny Cessna that swooped down and skidded to a stop on the beach.
In our thigh-high hip waders, we exited the plane and began a three-hour walk on the shores of Lake Clark National Park. We had finally arrived in an Alaskan locale where bears were not only plentiful but also completely focused on digging up clams and nearly oblivious to our presence.
Within our first half hour on the beach, a bear came scarily close to us, but as we’d been told, she barely glanced our way and lumbered along on her quest for food. Anytime we were even a little bit close to a bear (it all seems close to someone who does not regularly see bears!), we were asked to kneel or crouch down low and stay still.
The company we used did not allow guides to carry any guns (we approved!), but they did carry marine flares that are loud, bright, and foul-smelling and are only used in the event a bear comes much too close and seems aggressive. In their history, they’d only had to shoot off a flare one time, our guide said, and it successfully warded off the bear.
As another aside, while we did not seem to be bothering the bears in the least, and rarely came very close to them or even within their sphere of awareness, it still felt like we were encroaching on their turf to some extent. Perhaps they have just become habituated to the small planes they see and hear? But that isn’t normal or natural. Was it significantly worse than hiking in their habitats? I don’t know! It was a great outing, but I’ve been thinking about it since we went.
The rest of the bears we saw that day were farther away, but it was still great fun to finally see so much wildlife, especially the mama bears with their cubs frolicking beside or behind them.
While the bears were awe-inspiring, perhaps the cutest animal of the day was a little red fox. We’d been in the park many hours by this point, and J decided to sneak off behind a tree as a “rest stop.” The rest of us were staring into a field hoping to spot a few more bears when this adorable little fox danced up, checked us out, and then
headed directly behind us toward J and his tree! We all started to giggle, which J later said he thought was us being rude, but then he almost jumped (the rest of the way) out of his pants when the little guy stopped and looked up at him.
He proceeded to amuse us for several more minutes and then scampered away, a very sweet farewell to Lake Clark National Park and our afternoon brush with Alaskan wildlife.
Alaska and Hawaii were the 49th and 50th states to be admitted to the Union, and though we switched the order of the two, we were thrilled to finally be able to say we’d visited all 50 U.S. states. We were even more excited to be back in a geography and topography that makes us both very happy. After moving to the east coast almost two years ago, we sorely missed the American West, and Alaska immediately felt reminiscent of some of our favorite spots in Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and other mountain states.
Anchorage
After almost 12 hours of travel, we pulled out our secret jetlag antidote and immediately changed into hiking clothes and hit a trail just outside of Anchorage in the late afternoon. We had choices – flat, up-and-down, or super steep – and we chose the latter for various reasons, one of which is that we are ridiculous. Not only was it over 1300 ft (almost 400 m) straight up, but the top still had patches of snow and ice, and the winds were ferocious. Add in some nice loose scree and rock jumbles, and it might have been a little ambitious in the short time we had before we had to be back for dinner and a trolley tour that evening.
We are happy we did it, though, as we were only staying in Anchorage one night and we saved the nice coastal path for the morning before we drove out of town. We had a great dinner in a place recommended by my brother, raised another glass with some locals in a bar before our trolley time, and then nearly nodded off on the city tour even though we always refuse to calculate what time it is back home. (It was well after midnight, I can say now!) We did stay alert enough to watch for moose (very frequently sighted on the tour, supposedly) but saw exactly zero of them. Sadly, this wildlife jinx would extend throughout our time in Alaska.
The Coastal Trail runs for 12 miles one way, but we only covered about 5 miles round-trip the next morning before starting our drive north to Talkeetna and the area near Denali National Park.
It was a beautiful, cool morning, and the path was peaceful and gentle. Multiple signs warned us about what we should do if a moose appeared. One did not.
Talkeetna and Denali
On the way to Talkeetna, we took a detour to cross Hatcher Pass. On a bouncy, packed dirt road for many miles of this, we questioned our choice for a while but ultimately marveled at the views from the pass and seeing the piled-up snow still along the road in late June.
We arrived in cute Talkeetna in time for a sunny outdoor lunch of top-notch pizza and beer, which we attempted to walk off with an endless slog around a lake – no lake or any other views whatsoever, plus hordes of mosquitos – not our best choice of a hike.
A moose, a moose!
Our luck improved that evening with enough cloud movement to allow us to see the top of Denali. I guess very few people actually get to see the whole mountain, and J had given up himself and was ensconced in emails in the hotel room. I kept checking obsessively until suddenly the top emerged from the day-long cloud cover (I’ve never gotten over not getting to see Fitz Roy after a brutal 10-hour hike, so I was not going to let this one get away without a fight!)
After much research on how to best see Denali National Park, we chose to drive our own car 2.5 hours to the park visitor center and catch a park bus from there to go as deep into the park as one can go at this time. Cars can only go partway, and we’d heard that the bus drivers were good at spotting animals and explaining where to get off to hike.
“Frequenting” … perhaps we have a different definition?
It turned out to be a very long and unexciting day – about 5 hours on the bus, with no Denali (mountain) sightings at all, a lone baby elk so far away it looked like a mere dot on a patch of snow, and misting rain that discouraged us from hopping off for a hike.
Our driver seemed entertaining at first but rapidly became tiresome, talking almost solely about himself. We were very happy to get off the bus in the late afternoon and drive back to Talkeetna for a cozy dinner at the bar in a brewpub and a final night at the classic park lodge we had booked, a favorite of the trip.
To Homer via the Seward Highway
The next day was a mishmash of stops on our way to Homer and an interim stay in Alyeska. We made a quick stop in Wasilla to see the Iditarod Museum (moderately interesting, but we did love the film about the dogs) and then drove on to Palmer to climb the West Bodenburg Butte Trail to the top of the butte to get a panoramic view of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. The Mat-Su valley is a highly fertile area where farmers apparently grow enormous vegetables. We were too early in the summer to see the really big ones, but the hike was a good climb up 500+ steps.
From here we drove for many miles along the Turnagain Arm, one of two branches of the Cook Inlet. The towering Chugach State Park mountains were a constant on the left side of the Seward Highway and the miles-wide flats extended to the far shores of the inlet on the right. The Turnagain Arm has wildly fluctuating climate and tide ranges, with the second highest tides in North America and tops in the U.S. at 40 ft (12 m). (While we knew of neither place before, we saw the #1 place for highest tides three months later at the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada.)
As the weather grew gray and drizzly, we pushed on to our cozy ski hotel in Alyeska and a great dinner at a tiny restaurant in town, again recommended by my brother. Lucky J got up very early the next day and got the only solid view of a moose we would see on the trip. I had to settle for his photo. People kept telling us over and over again that the NEXT highway was chockful of moose, the road into THAT park would for sure be crowded with moose. This would come to be our total allotment of moose, a single fellow on the grounds of our hotel.
Speaking of animal warnings, we took our next potentially bear-laden hike later that morning on the Winner Creek Trail. Pretty much totally alone for the five miles out and back, we found ourselves peering closely through the lush rainforest foliage and keeping our ears perked up for any rustling. You know it – not a creature in sight – but we had a delightful time on this thick forest trail with footbridges over deep gorges. We learned at the entry sign that this was part of the northernmost coastal rainforest in the world, so at least we had that going for us – who needs bears?!
Homer
My parents had raved about Homer for years, saying it was their favorite spot in Alaska, and my brother had put us onto a small enclave of houses/cabins overlooking Kachemak Bay. When we arrived, we were more than pleased; the small house was comfortable and kitted out with everything we could possibly need for a few days, including a hot tub on the deck that overlooked the bay and mountains beyond.
At the end of a couple of days, though, I suffered from the disappointment that comes with expecting too much. Homer had its charms – a fantastic local breakfast spot that we’d go to everyday if we could, a relaxing little brewery with good beer and a sunny courtyard, and several solid halibut dinners (Homer is the Halibut Capital of the World).
We took a sweet loop hike in a field of early summer daisies and lupine, and we ambled along Bishop’s Beach and the short Beluga Slough Trail.
We found a (very) few fun shops along the Homer Spit, a long thin strip of land poking into Kachemak Bay. Luckily, we had planned a half day outing from here in an effort to see another national park and maybe, maybe see some animals. More on that in a separate post!
Seward
We left Homer mid-afternoon and retraced our drive up and over the Kenai Peninsula and then back down to Seward. The small town was gearing up for the 4th of July as well as a mountain race, so we just walked around a street fair and grabbed a casual dinner at (once again) a brewery.
We rose early the next day to catch an 8 am boat tour of the fjords that snake in and out of the Kenai Peninsula.
It was unfortunately another gray, misty day once we got out of the harbor so the scenery was a bit more understated than we had hoped, but it was still very cool to sail right up to the face of a huge glacier and catch a glimpse of a few sea animals.
Our lasting memory of the fjords tour, however, will be the very rough seas that left a great majority of the passengers seasick and all that entails. For whatever reason, I was not only spared but was quite hungry, so I ate an enormous bean burrito that was served to us at lunchtime (who thought that was a great idea on these seas?) even as everyone else, including J, looked disgusted with me and wrapped theirs up for later consumption! I spent as much time as I could in the wind and spray outside so I could really see the glaciers and other landforms (and get away from all the sick people).
We wrapped up our Alaskan activities the next day with the best hike of all, a strenuous round-trip on the Harding Icefield Trail leaving from the valley floor of Kenai Fjords National Park. This trail winds steeply up over 1000’ per mile through cotton and alder forests, meadows of wildflowers, and finally above treeline. Nearly 40 glaciers flow from the Harding Icefield, and our hike took us up past Exit Glacier with different and more amazing views as we climbed.
As we started, we were warned:
“This is bear country! The vegetation along the trail is dense and passes though thickets of salmonberrries, a favorite food of black bears. Black bears are spotted almost every day from the Harding Icefield Trail.”
But, for once, I was glad to be thwarted in our bear viewing as we were already on tricky terrain and would not have enjoyed coming face to face with a big, scary creature as we rounded a tight corner here.
(Three months later, two hikers were attacked and fought off a bear only a quarter mile up the busier trial at the base; I can’t even imagine dealing with this as high as we went.)
We had not brought our micro-spikes to Alaska (it was summer, right?), and this final day of hiking showed us our error as we slipped and slid on slanted fields of snow. We made it past the Top of the Cliffs segment but after that our lack of poles and spikes forced us to turn around.
Even from there, I, along with many other trekkers that day, sat down and slid on my butt to keep from taking a tumble and sailing right off the edge of the mountain. It was an adventuresome way to end an adventure-filled trip to our 50th state!
One Foot Out the Door 