June 2011

Splendor in Alaska / Fjords NP

On the drive back to Anchorage, I stop in Seward for the night. Long a fishing town on the eastern shore of the Kenai Peninsula, it was named for William Seward, Secretary of State under President Lincoln and dealmaker for the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Seward is popular with tourists as a departure point for boat trips into Kenai Fjords National Park.

I sign on with a group promising an all-day adventure that takes us to the tongue of a glacier. A large motorboat ferrys campers and trekkers to various beaches along the Fjords’ many inlets. It drops us several miles from Holgate Glacier, where we unload the kayaks.

It’s a beautiful day for paddling. We head out for several miles along the shore, stopping occasionally to explore boreal forests, until we get within a few hundred yards of the glacier’s front wall. There we scatter, with some heading closer to the glacier, others playing among large chunks of calved ice, though not big enough to be bergs. A sightseeing boat from Seward provides scale to the glacier’s enormous 400-foot-high face, which rumbles and moans in its slow progression to the sea as we skiddle about.

“I never get tired of this dynamic, ever-changing landscape,” says a Kenai Fjords National Park ranger who paddles over to check us out. Just as we’re talking, a big section of ice calves into the inlet with an explosive percussion. It sends waves toward us that quickly dissipate in the deep fjord. “As I was saying, this landscape is dynamic, living, unpredictable and wild.”

 

 

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Splendor in Alaska / Lake Clark NP

Next stop: Soldotna, on the Kanai Peninsula. But skirting the north shore of Turnagain Arm on the drive from Anchorage, I turn into the funky ski town of Girdwood for a lunch break. I often ate in a restaurant during winter visits to Alyeska resort, which I like for the backcountry cat-skiing and heliskiing operations, and I wanted to see what it’s like on a sunny summer day. The resort’s lift-served mountain, a 3,000-foot peak that rises directly above Cook Inlet, offers the weird feeling of skiing down to a beach. Alyeska also offers some of the steepest in-bounds ski slopes I’ve ever seen,steep enough to turn my stomach as I picture jumping in off the edge.

From Soldotna, a bush plane flies me west across the Cook Inlet to remote Lake Clark National Park, passing on the way the snow-laden cone of Mount Redoubt, a 10,197-foot volcano that rises like royalty from the sea. As we buzz past a volcanic black-sand beach, then swing back around to land on it — the flight is timed to coincide with low tide — I spot three brown bears grazing on meadows no more than 200 yards away. Brown bears are grizzlies that live on the coast. They tend to be fatter and healthier-looking than their inland brethren due to their protein-rich diet of salmon once the fish start running upstream in August.

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Splendor in Alaska / Denali NP

From the open platform of the dome car, I can see ridges, glaciers and neighboring peaks, but the tallest mountain in North America is playing coy. “Is that Denali?” a little girl asks her father, pointing to a white pyramid floating on a blanket of clouds. Denali is another name for Mount McKinley, the centerpiece of Alaska’s Denali National Park and, 20,320 feet, North America’s highest peak.

We are en route to the Park via Alaska Railroad’s Denali Star train to Fairbanks. We pulled out of Anchorage at 8:15 am and were immediately in a land of birch forests, teal-blue lakes and steep mountains. The Gold-Star service offers a restaurant and dome cars with great views, but I preferred the covered train-top platform’s open-air perspective over the majestic landscape and tumbling rivers. The train gets to Denali at 4 pm, and to Fairbanks at 8 pm, a 12 hour journey.

Just south of Talkeetna, Denali comes into view though it is still more than 60 miles away. Talkeetna serves as launch point for climbers preparing ascents of the continent’s most dangerous peak. (With more than 100 deaths, it ranks on one list as the world’s 10th most dangerous climb, just behind Everest.) When the weather clears, ski-rigged bush planes scurry to get climbers to and from glaciers where their ascents begin and end before fickle weather closes in again. For more earth-bound travelers, Talkeetna is a popular, comfortable and funky vacation base for fishing, mountain biking, rafting and flying over Denali.

 


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