Another rain-free day. So still this morning around 730a that you could take the reflection postcards photos of the shore. But the still and slight warmth meant so many bugs that a planned kayaking trip was aborted.

(We’re actually out of any internet or cell phone contact this whole week, so I’ve preposted what happened to us in previous trips.)

So after a wonderful breakfast of french toast and bacon, mixed fruits tossed in yoghurt and cranberry nut muffins, the boat sailed on. The rest of the day was dominated by the Meares Glacier at the end of the long Uniakwik fiord.

We sailed up the fiord past other fishing vessels and a fish hatchery, and began to see really quite extraordinary numbers of sea otters. Ninety percent of the world’s sea otters are found in Alaska and most of them in the Sound.

Just before lunch we turned the one corner right at the end of the sound to bring into view the Meares Glacier. Smaller than Chenega, it was still quite impressive. Stands about 100′ high and is unique for moving right up to a Sitka spruce forest. Most glaciers have been receding in the last century, so their front yard is rock face. Meares has come and gone, and the evidence is crushed forest at its edge.

After lunch we too the skiff and three dogs and went ashore. There had been a trail which had been wiped out by the most forward movement of the glacier, but we managed to find a stream bed that took us up the mountain slightly and then intersected a bear trail which took us to almost the very face of the glacier.

At that height the view was impressive, and we watched crazy Happy Dog retrieve little icebergs from 50′ below a sheer cliff face and bound back up with them. And we watched, of course, the glacier calving, which is an endlessly fascinating activity.

Glacier calving will never be an Olympic sport, and it’s darn hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced what’s so special about it. I think first that it’s the sheer power that’s being displayed when so much ice crashes into the sea.

And the crash, which resounds and echoes and booms like nuclear explosions, appears slow motioned from where you can usually view it – far enough away not to be tsunamied to death. The ship continued into a little cove with an absolutely beautiful waterfall. Most of us got on the skiff to go take a closer look, and then a quick moment for photos and back to the boat.

Dinner was a sumptuous piya of halibut, prawns (shrimps), mussels and bunches of other things and was magnificent. During dinner large glaciers calved and Dean had to point the boat into the swells.

After desert of raspberry creme brulee, Captain Dean moved very slowly through great ice peppered with dozens if not more sea otters.

We had tied up just outside Inuikiak Inlet and as we were eating breakfast Captain Dean sailed a very short way into adjacent Cedar Bay, where we had our first kayaking experience. It was a beautiful bay with several different inlets and smaller islands and several streams, one of which had salmon running slightly in it.

(We’re actually out of any internet or cell phone contact this whole week, so I’ve preposted what happened to us in previous trips.)

Immediately I spotted a junco singing on the top of a dead tree as I kayaked close to the shore. Then later pelagic cormorants, marbled muirlets, common loons, a great blue heron (which is unusual for here), glaucous gulls (of course) and a pair of nesting arctic terns. But in the forests I heard multiple kinds of warblers and at least one type of thrush.

We kayaked for nearly two hours and everyone seemed to do fine despite the first-time experience for several. Lunch was excellent, a needle pasta salad with peas and carrots and a stromboli.

The rest of the afternoon was peaceful and pleasant sailing, especially since the crew was so pleased and the weather was so nice. We spotted a whale or two, lots of sea otters and a tranquil sailing in the open sea. Gregg and I spent a lot of time on the bow just sitting and watching.

Captain Dean kept sailing virtually right through dinner and after dinner we took the zodiacs into Sheep Bay (better were it named Bear Bay) where the tide was just perfect for what Dean wanted to do.

There was a wide river that was quite shallow, and at high tide it flowed in and at low tide it flowed out, and at high tide would be high enough to take the zodiac’s engine. It was a beautiful bay with towering, heavily forested sides that gave an impression of exploring a canyon, except that the main river ended at several very shallow, small clear salmon streams. And the salmon were jumping madly (silver salmon).

The first bear spotted was walking down the stream to the face with the river, but he also spotted us and was very shy. Dean explained this was a hunting area. So he cut the engine and we simply drifted and there were tons of bald eagles, many near nests with chicks.

We drifted further to the other salmon stream and there spotted a second bear. (Both were brown, grizzlies; one was brown, the other grey.) Then we motored over to a different part of the river lake and it was like silver salmon popping in a popcorn popper there were so many.

But as soon as the tide changed, we started out because it was a critical depth for the zodiac. Got back to the ship and most felt it was really a special overall experience. Dessert was waiting, Dean’s famous chocolate cake: exterior syrupy chocolate interior with whipped cream. Absolutely excellent.

Especially with malbec!

The last half of our Alaskan trip is a week-long private yacht cruise in Prince William Sound. It’s a great little ship, the Discovery, with only six very small cabins with two heads/showers, a superb team and outstanding cook.

(We’re actually out of any internet or cell phone contact this whole week, so I’ve preposted what happened to us in previous trips.)

Captain Dean knows the area like the back of his hand, and with Dean at the helm this little boat gets into those places in paradise nobody else can!

The cruise starts from Whittier, which look like a text book picture of a sailing village: lots of private vessels mixed in with commercial ones. After sumptuous hors d’oeuvres and an unlimited supply of beer and wine, we got off in the early afternoon.

Hardly twenty minutes out and still within site of Whittier we came upon a black-legged kitiweg colony of about 6000 birds nesting on a sheer rock wall, and below then were a handful of pigeon guillemots and above, glaucous gulls. From there we headed into open sea with a half dozen other vessels of various sizes and shapes and enjoyed consuming the final snacks as lunch.

In mid-afternoon we arrived Corolos Island and anchored, and had a very beautiful and enjoyable hike. The scenery is really quite beautiful: mossy tundra-like ground with a dozen or so types of wild flowers, mostly small and elegant; ferns and other weird plants mostly low to the ground. The dominant forest is sitka spruce.

The terrain rolled all over the place and finally up to a mountain top. Large blotches of snow were everywhere, laid like random frostings on a cake, with several cases of glacial melt that turned the water pure light blue. Tiny streams cut through the moss like fissures in an icefield.

The dogs – yes we have wonderful dogs aboard – scared up both gull and merganser chicks as we walked to the top of a water fall and then circled back around on what was about a 2½ hour spectacular initial walk.

Returned to Discovery, and while everyone was gleeing and gloating and drinking and relaxing Dean intersected some of the salmon fishing fleet, probably on their first 24-hour open of the season. The small boats strung out a net up to 900 feet long and 18 feet deep, and simply let it hang. The plastic monofilaments ensnared the salmon. They then rolled them up and immediately sold them to tender ships, which stood like ill-kept tug boats with a single crane waiting in the shadows to gobble up the fish.

The individual fisherpeople preferred dealing with these middle men, because their boats were too small to have refrigeration, for example. They preferred to just fish 24 hours round-the-clock. Most of the salmon coming in were returning to the nearby hatchery which seeds up to a quarter billion salmon annually; 8% survive and return to spawn.

Their normal routine is to come directly down the middle of the sound, hit the shore and then swim back up the shore. “Strayers” – perhaps guided by ancestral genetics – may work their way towards streams in the wild, but most of these are heading back to the hatchery area.

This run was mostly of chum salmon, which Matt the chef called the dog of salmon and not very tasty. But the huge numbers of them are used commercially for canned salmon and other high quantity salmon processed foods.

Because the better salmon aren’t of interest to these fishermen, we were able to get four giant sockeye salmon from a friend that Dean knew, Leo and his son, who were fishing and we stopped to greet.

Dinner was outstanding: salmon, asparagus, great salad, rice mixture and great home-made bread, with apple cobbler for desert! Fabulous and full, we all wandered to bed in the midnight sun as the boat docked in a quiet bay surrounded by sea otters and jelly fish.

Stay tuned!

Denali never disappoints, but not because it ever shows itself. One guide said they average 5 days per season that the mountain is clear. This year we had two days of hardly a cloud in the sky. It’s scary.

And I’m not being facetious. The winter was long in Alaska this year, with the snow clearing not until May 18 in Fairbanks, and May 22 in Denali where we’re at, now. There was so much snow this year that early bird migrants like the violet-green swallow died trying to nest before the ice had melted out of the eves and underhangings.

And the folks in Fairbanks at the Creamers Birder Reserve told us that once the snow was gone, “there was no spring,” that it leaped right to summer.

And that the bird response was to go into hyper drive, and late migrants or ones that were hanging back did double time to catch up to a more normal placement.

So today on Quigley Ridge on the far western edge of Denali National Park outside Kantishna six of us saw the most incredible display of wild flowers our guide, Kelly Cummings, had ever seen.

Kelly thought that perhaps the early wildflowers and the later wildflowers were all merging, because of the collapsed time before them as a result of the extended winter.

And they were illuminated in a totally cloudless sky.

Cloudless sky? Denali in June?

Kelly said that this was the second day like this since she arrived the last week of May. And that in the previous year, there had been only 7 days like this the whole season (through mid-September).

We saw moose scat, moose tracks, heard from another backpacking group they had seen a mother grizzly and her cub, and we actually saw caribou and a short-tailed weasel. We hiked up about 1400 vertical feet through sections of thick alder, and over a lot of loose rock, until we saw the Alaska Range in its most spectacular.

Mt. McKinley’s shorter North Peak filled the sky. Bill Banzhaf said to me, “That scares me.” We couldn’t see the true summit 850′ higher, the South Peak, because we were too close and the North Peak blocked the South Peak view. We were about 30 nautical miles from the summit.

Our 90-mile, just under 7 hour drive the day before from park headquarters to our lodge in Kantishna was equally rewarding.

The views from the ranger station were stupendous, and we saw 8 grizzlies, dozens of dall sheep, two moose practically licking the vehicle, and caribou. We even followed a bear on the road slowly, in a short line of vehicles that had no other option, until he was lured off road by a dead squirrel. Which he quickly consumed as we motored past.

Our fantastic two days comes to an end as we fly around the mountain to Talkeetna.

Stay tuned!

Some things are so big, it’s good to first try understanding them from the air. That’s Alaska, and that’s one big difference with Africa.

Not that Africa isn’t big. In fact I have fun explaining to clients that the distance from Mombasa on the Kenyan Indian Ocean, to Dakar on the Atlantic Ocean – that distance is greater than from Dakar to New York.

But in that massive area there are oceans, deserts, lakes, raging rivers and tiny streams, volcanoes and canyons and really really hot places and very very cold places. There is a biomass variety to Africa that is mind boggling.

And equally mind boggling is how quickly one ecosystem will change into another. Lake Manyara National Park is the best example, a relatively tiny place of around 40 sq. miles with more species of native trees than exist in the entire Upper Midwest where I live! But no single place, no more or less 2 or 3 uniform ecologies, rival the expanse of Alaska.

Alaska is mind boggling in that way. Mostly, it’s just so incredibly big. And hate to say it, but big is beautiful. And obviously there is a difference between the high arctic ecology and Admiralty Island park’s rain forests. But interesting, there’s not a lot in between. There is a beautiful, gradual change from one major ecosystem into another.

I’ve visited Alaska a dozen times, and every time begins obviously with the flight in. Unfortunately, Alaskan weather doesn’t give you very good odds at seeing much until you hit the runway and spray the day’s rain onto your window.

But today was special for me! Good, beautiful, clear and crisp weather. But of the many big things I expect to see with my group of intrepid travelers over the next several weeks, we can hardly cover the whole State. Here’s another GoogleEarth-line: From the Aleutian Islands in Alaska’s west to Ketchikan in its southeast – that distance is greater than New York to San Diego!

So it was a treat for me to see something we won’t on this trip – directly below as the cloud’s cleared and we were about an hour out of Fairbanks was the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Tongass National Forest.

At 13.2 million acres, Wrangell is bigger than Switzerland, not only the largest national park in the country, but in the world. And Tongass which adjoins it includes most of southeast Alaska. Add them together and they would be the fourth largest state after Alaska, Texas and California.

And unlike Texas and California, probably 80% of it has not been stepped on. Satellites have mapped its every nook and cranny, but no footsteps of man.

And then I considered… Wrangell is larger than all the national parks of Kenya combined!

That was my first view of Alaska, today. And as we descended the snow-capped mountains revealed some of the lushest earth on the planet, the rich biomass exploding in celebration of the solstice.

Big is beautiful!

There’s nothing extraordinary in the realization that the ends of the earth are wilderness. In many ways it’s why they’re the ends of the earth. In the case of Alaska, it’s radical climate, daylight hours, threatening geology frame the borders of our planet with what’s livable.

A wealth of biomass from the world’s great whales to many of its birds flock here as natural selection would want, to exploit the extreme nutrition that condenses itself in short periods each year. Think of it this way: the amount of sunshine is identical anyplace on earth. It’s just at the poles a lot more of it comes in their summer and none in their winter.

This means life adapts in strange ways, essentially living the life of Riley for about 3 months of the year and sleeping for the rest. Plants, inuit, and I dare say immigrant humans all adapt to that strange lifestyle.

But earth’s travelers aren’t anchored to any spot. So the world’s behemoth, the blue whale, and its most angelic if hyper bird, the hummingbird, make journey after journey here for the privilege of working 24 hours a day for three months.

It’s a work routine lots of young people aspire to!

When I first went to Alaska it was much different than today. The growth of earth has transformed Anchorage from a weirdo’s way station to a magnificent city. The wealth of neglected natural resources made the hillbilly a billionaire. Fairbanks was a cold place for airmen. Today its university leads research in astronomy and natural resources.

And there’s a lot more tourists.

Just like Africa. So our job is to recover, perhaps preserve, the thrills of the past.

Humans need thrills. Adrenalin is not just for avoiding the boss. We need to jolt our physiognomy every once and a while to keep it tuned up.

The scenery of Alaska and Africa is simply incomparable. There are many places in the world as expansive and awesome as Denali, and there are many places in the world as overwhelmingly beautiful as the plains of the Serengeti. But then, there’s also Prince William Sound and the Wrangells, Ngorongoro Crater and Manyara’s cliffs.

The compactness of beautiful, thrilling scenery in Alaska and Africa has no rival.

We get rather boring every now and again. But a lion and a bear are never boring. The natural world is dominated by sheer force buffeted by the brilliance of natural selection. It’s nice everywhere once in a while to be relieved of having to be clever, or make the right decision, or figure out your taxes.

It’s nice to be in a beautiful place where the order of everything is predetermined. It’s something of an intellectual copout – and certainly not what humans were built to do.

But humans are different from everything else, and in these great wildernesses we come to understand exactly how and why.

“Awe replaces anxiety,” Patricia Schultz writes in the New York Times.

Stay tuned! I’ll try to post pictures of our trip, but here’s a remarkable secret: I get less connectivity in Alaska than Africa!