Skagway
The previous entry is Juneau.
June 2
Skagway was where I saw how important that extra stop or two on the 80-200mm f/2.8 lens is worth: when you’re on a pitching boat and want to take shots of wildlife, you really do need a very high shutter speed, especially with a 450mm film-equivalent focal length on the lens/teleconverter combo. We saw seals sunbathing on rocks, dozens of feet away from the boat, which was thick with people trying to get their shots in, all the while bobbing up and down in the waves. Amateur photographers have few luxuries of time and place to work, but at least the envelope in which you might get acceptable shots can be expanded with better equipment. Someone asked me if I could get anything good out of such a big lens on a rocking boat, and I replied, yes, because the lens is fast. I’m not sure how much longer a lens could be used handheld in these conditions, but the 200mm f/2.8 and 1.5x teleconverter plus polarizer is probably close to the limit, and only because of the fast aperture; slower lens aren’t going to work, not without VR to buy you that extra effective stop or two.
We had another morning shore excursion — most of our scheduled excursions were in the morning, so we’d have time to explore the ports before dinner. This day, we would take a fast boat to a short hiking trail, head over to a river and paddle up to the face of a glacier. Basically, we would be doing what we saw from a distance when walking near the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, but with even more time spent on water.
There was some worry that I’d get seasick on the boat to the glacier — I had gotten very seasick on a whalewatching trip in Maine some years ago and got a bit sick on the cruise ship itself when it was in open waters south of Ketchikan — but the fast catamaran was fine, sort of line a bumpy subway ride when it was going at speed. It was a relatively short trip, too, about 45 minutes from Skagway, down the Lynn Channel fjord, past Haines, to a beach landing for our trip through the woods. There was a short detour when someone spotted the distant spray from a whale, but it had started its long dive by the time we turned around to the spot and we didn’t have time to wait 20 minutes for it to come back up. We also took the scenic route to see the above mentioned group of seals lounging around on sunny rocks.
On the way down the fjord, our excellent guide gave a lecture on the natural history of glaciers, how retreating glaciers carve out fjords and how the local ecology is dominated by the presence of the glacier: the particularly cold water in the fjord and the 18-hours of daylight blooms dense beds of plankton — the waters in the fjord are almost bright green — which bring the fish, which bring the whales and seals. There are also salmon, which bring the eagles (late in the salmon run, the Lynn Channel has the highest concentration of bald eagles in the world). The retreating glacier also leaves sterile land behind it. You can see forest development progress in from the beach to the foot of the glacier, with the oldest and most developed trees on the shore, and the grasses closest to glacier. There are differents types of trees and shrubs in between, with the shorter shrubs eventually being killed off by the taller trees, which have evolutionarily developed greater height in the competition for sunlight. Along every hill on the fjord is a waterfall, and we hear about the stunning amounts of water that comes through this part of Alaska every year. We learn a little bit of the history Davidson Glacier we’re about to see: it was described by John Muir (it has retreated three miles inland since his visit more than a century ago) and was one of the glaciers in the area that helped him propose his theory that the landscape was carved by glaciers (this would still be in the day that geologists thought the earth was more or less static).
After landing at the Glacier Point beach, we drove inland on modified all-wheel drive school buses to a camp where a team of guides fitted us out with life preservers, watertight boots and extra clothing — the glacial lake could be cold with the wind coming off the ice, and some people had dressed too lightly. The area was swarming with mosquitoes, our first real encounter with the Alaskan state bird. We were told the mosquitoes would be gone by the time we were on the water, as the wind would blow them away. I saw one the size of a quarter lounging on the side of the shack. After gearing up, we hiked a quarter-mile to the river landing where the wide-bottomed canoes were, and were told how to row, how to get out of the canoe without tipping it over, how we weren’t supposed to stand, etc. For some reason, Grace and I got the front seats and were designated “paddle captains”, with the rest of our canoe coordinating their paddling with us. (It was lucky: we got a good view and had a place to safe place to put our bags.) Our canoe guide sat in the back to steer and, later, operate the outboard motor. She would shout out one of three paddling instructions: forward, back and stop. Olympic crew we weren’t.
The canoe paddling was easier than expected, and wasn’t strenuous at all: anyone could do it. We basically paddled for about a mile until we got to the glacial lake, and then the guide turned the motor on: all the better to manuveur given the spots on the lake we were going, and given the more intense wind off the glacier. There were “small” icebergs in the lake, the above-surface portions far bigger than the canoes. An eagle also flew over each of the canoes to see what was going on. With the eagle overhead, a panicked flock of terns took wing from their perches on a gravel hill near the glacier, fleeing the area.
The glacier face was about 80′ high and we got a few hundred feet from it. The guides go to the glacier every day and have a good idea about when it might be calving, but there was no need to get close enough to risk a whole canoe being sunk by falling ice. The size of thing has to be experienced: it’s not well conveyed by mere photos. We headed back down the river after cruising the lake for a while, and it was back to paddles again as we landed the canoes. On the way back, we found out that being tour guides in Alaska was a popular summertime activity for the ski bums who winter in Colorado. It’s good money and the landscape is amazing.
On the catamaran ride back, the guide noted that the whole economy of the region has been transformed with the arrival of Alaskan tourism. Places like Skagway would be ghost towns but for the dollars tourists bring. Similarly, the native economies would be less prosperous. The catamaran we were riding is the fastest around, owned and operated by a Tlingit group. The boat was commissioned a couple of years ago by the tour company, with specifications to service visitors from the cruise ships — it had to be capable of going fast enough to make the trip from Skagway’s docks to Glacier Point in 45-minutes to conform with cruise ship schedules; it had to seat so many people; it had to be able to do a beach landing because that’s all Glacier Point has — and off-season, it would just be a fast ferry around the fjord. Similarly, there were all sorts of native artists supplying crafts to the souvenir shops, in terms of sandstone carvings and small totem poles, as well as more contemporary art. From a personal point of view, our guide had taken the same tour we had a few years ago; it was a life-changing experience that got him to move to Alaska himself. The tourist money keeps him employed at a job he loves; we should all leave good reviews of his tour, and comments on how to improve it.
Skagway itself looks like a stereotypical town out of the Old West, with plank sidewalks, frontier architecture and former saloons (now souvenir shops and cafes) lining the long main street. At the time of the Yukon gold rush, it was the northernmost town that could be reached by ship, and was one of the main transit points for fortune-seekers continuing into inland. A railway up into the interior helped the town survive and continue to be a main transit point, even as the gold rush petered out. (A number of the shore excursions featured historic railroad rides from Skagway to the interior. From our balcony, we saw one of the trains depart before our tour began. The locals guiding passengers aboard wore period frontier costumes to fit the theme.) We walked around there for a bit. (Our tour guide had recommended the smoked salmon made and sold by some friends of his, and we spent some time looking for the shop. We bought some to have as a snack on the bus ride down from Prudhoe Bay, but misplaced it in Anchorage.)
Though there were a few free museum exhibits on Skagway’s past, the center of town is geared entirely to tourism. Skagway was perhaps the densest tourist town we had seen, where everything seems to have been given over to the visitors from the cruise ships. And for some reason (this is true for all the Alaskan tourist towns), there’s a shockingly large number of jewelry stores that sit mostly empty. Someone must be buying expensive jewelry, but I don’t know why you’d do it on a cruise, in a tourist trap. These stores cluster close to each other on the main street, close to the docks, like the strange golden heart of this economy. Around them are the busier souvenier stores, selling everything from t-shirts, gag gifts, tours, Russian nesting dolls, native art work, tins of salmon, Ulu knives and snacks to the crowds that pulse in off the gangways. Money flows in from the wealthier parts of the world, arriving on the cruise ships that may be the metaphorical whales of the modern Alaska, with tourism as the metaphorical whaling tradition.
The next entry is Sitka.