Gray on Gray with Shades of Dark Green

For two golden hours on a mid-May evening, I chase the Canadian sunset northward. I leave behind clouds spread beneath me like fractured glass and enter a land of glowing snow-dusted ridges, jagged peaks, frozen lakes, ice fields, fjords and mist.

The town of Sitka nestles into Baranof Island’s eastern edge, where the Indian River twists out from dense, rugged mountains to meet the Pacific. Sitka itself consists of a main street, a Russian orthodox church, thousands of fishing boats and two seedy bars with smoke so thick you can barely see across the room, walls lined with decades of local history held in uniform faded photos. It’s a place where you walk into a gallery filed with thousands of chintzy souvenirs made in China, but when you turn to leave you nearly trip over the flimsy chest-high barrier set around a monster mammoth skull.

Sitka also happens to have one of the best-run raptor rehabilitation centers I’ve ever seen, product of a symbiotic relationship with tourism in the town. The center sits ten minutes’ walk beyond Totem Park, a wooded peninsula where totem poles from across the state stand tall amongst surrounding trees’ strong silhouettes. Amongst the park’s trails, soft brown trunks and roots create wild tangles across the forest floor, bordered by blankets of false lily of the valley’s broad, shining green leaves. Every so often, spruce and hemlock clear along the coast line, revealing views of Mt. Edgecombe’s near-perfect cone, snow-streaked slopes glinting under the midday sun as the tide recedes.

The boat, the National Geographic Sea Bird, is smaller than I expected. It resembles a toy next to the dock, dwarfed by the cable bridge linking Baranoff and Japonski islands. It barely clears the bright white clearance markers on the bridge’s columns, used by fishermen as reference in Alaska’s widely-fluctuating tides.

We leave under the eye of an eagle perched on the bridge’s tallest supports, head forward into the sound and spend the next four days exploring wild places. We follow Peril Straight northward from Sitka and swing west through smaller islands and inlets bordering open ocean before passing Glacier Bay en route to Haines, turning southward to Endicott arm and finally arriving into Juneau. Classic Southeast Alaskan rain casts the world in a soft light for the better part of our journey. Low clouds sink into valleys, wrapping ridges and blotting out mountain tops as they disappear above snow-streaked slopes. Bald eagles wing overhead and watch the world from treetop perches, almost as common here as crows in the city. 

In Pavlov Harbor, brown bears glistening silver on the shoulder and rump prowl the shoreline, turning stones and scraping barnacles as they feed after emerging from hibernation. Skunk cabbage sprouts from soft ground, bright yellow blossoms nibbled to stubby spirals by bears taking advantage of the natural laxative. The plant, although completely unrelated, attracts nocturnal pollinators by producing heat in the same method as Malaysia’s rafflesia flower in a beautiful example of convergent species. Tiny frogs, known as messengers between worlds as they move amongst land and water, hide in small rivulets amongst the harbor’s reedy bogs.

In Idaho Inlet, we step onto shore through slippery, matted seaweed and hike through marine meadow into rainforest, following bear trails so often trafficked they resemble human paths. We find places where bears has stepped in the same spot year after year, wearing depressions known as perennial footprints into the ground five inches deep. An eagle’s tail feather nestles into the sodden ground beneath a dead, forked tree. Tucked into the forest’s green underbelly, a narrow stream cascades down the hillside, singing across spongy ground. A short scramble brings us to a narrow lookout where we find old, half-buried bones, and a half hour later, hands and knees caked in soil, we’ve uncovered a brown bear’s jawbone and shattered skull, remnants of a final charge ended by a clip of bullets emptied straight between its eyes.

The Inian Islands rise as sentinels bordering open ocean. Gentle rain softens their jagged edges, transforming imposing stone towers to layered gray as they fade into the distance beyond deep turquoise water filled with twisting green kelp. We wind around the coast in zodiacs, stopping to watch a humpback whale surface 30 meters ahead of us, revealing its fluke as it turns downward to feed. We pass sea lion bachelor pads on our way to narrower channels where the currents rush with the incoming tide. We pause in the midst of a feeding frenzy while sea lions patrol the waters, surfacing with skates and halibut in their mouths, thrashing to break them into edible chunks. Gulls float in the wind by the thousands, diving to scavenge scraps while otters tuck themselves out of the way, wrapped snug in bull kelp.

In Glacier Bay National Park, light breaks and glances off the water in a blinding wash as orcas hunt in front of our ship, dorsal fins slicing forward. Coastal brown bears prowl grassy shorelines behind muddy tidal flats, and the breeze catches light green lichen hung thick from trees. We plunge headlong into a geological time warp as we make our way northward, slipping up sheer, glossy fjords. Polished gray walls cut by smooth, steep valleys tower thousands of feet overhead, and water streams down thousand-meter cliffs in slender, silvery ribbons.

We dock in Haines for a day. I make good use of the morning dodging moose poop as I climb three miles of trail and roots sheathed in water up Mt. Riley’s flank. A bog crossed by means of a narrow, tippy boardwalk sits just under the mountain’s summit, which happens to be completely, classically socked in. The hike reminds me distinctly and fondly of Tasmania… minus all the stuff that wants to kill you.

That afternoon I climb into a tiny plane, which floats into the sky, following the fjord’s clean line forward before twisting over snaking glaciers cut by dark moraines, deep fissures cresting and yawning blue beneath us. A hanging glacier shears abruptly above a deep, cavernous bowl, water spouting from beneath the ice, plunging over the edge to converge a thousand feet below before continuing its journey downward. Mountain goats perch on black walls high above the ice, munching mouthfuls of grass as clouds skim their heads. As we turn back to wing over another ice field, the pilot points out bands of bare rock separating the ice and tree line: telltale sign the local glaciers are receding in thickness as well as length.

Below us, the fjord’s waters spread in a kaleidoscope of icy blue, cool turquoise and deep brown, denoting individual waters’ sources as glacial outpourings find their way into the sea and converge, carrying silt so fine it remains at the water’s surface miles into its journey.

We spend our last day in Endicott Arm, nudging up to small ice bergs by kayak in the morning before continuing up to where the long, broad, twisting fjord ends in Dawes’ Glacier’s 250-foot wall of teetering, fractured ice. The boat picks its way through a frozen labyrinth as we approach the glacier, passing the occasional harbor seal sprawled on a flat ice berg. Rare translucent icebergs the color of blue curacao, indicative of hundreds of years of pressure squeezing the last traces of air from the ice, shimmer like glass as they glow in the afternoon light.

The glacier itself is so expansive it distorts perception: ice appearing to be within arm’s reach turns out to be miles from the boat. We load zodiacs and leave the ship behind to approach, finding ourselves surrounded by a film of floating ice amidst the deafening hiss and crackle of long-compressed air releasing from its icy prison. Sharp cracks split the air as blocks of ice hundreds of feet tall calve from the glacier, plunging into the ocean in what the locals refer to as “white thunder.” Churning water crashes outward against the fjord’s walls and waves push forward, sending ice bergs into lazy rolls.

We begin returning northward toward Juneau that evening, and I duck into the bridge after dinner to watch the world pass. The bridge is quiet at night. It provides a refuge of sorts from cold, wind, and rain, and from the closeness of a boat full of people, as twilight lingers. Dimmed lights turn the evening to a world of red, monitors and sensors’ readouts in constant flux above the paper maps spread across the counter.

Sometime later a pod of Dahls porpoises makes an appearance as we cross Stephens Passage, darting in and out from beneath the bow as they ride the vessel’s forward pressure, white flank patches flashing and tails throwing up sharp oval circles of foam as they break the surface. The porpoises remain with the boat until after I’ve found my way back into my cabin for one last night, and when I wake, we’ve arrived in Juneau.