About a year after our san juan’s kayaking trip, Diane had this great idea of doing a sea kayaking trip in Alaska - in the Chugach mountains area. She did all the research and found us a guide group and we were on our way!
We flew into Anchorage and then rented a car to drive to Whittier - which is the deep water port that services Anchorage and cuts through the small mountain range that separates Anchorage from Prince William Sound. The Whittier tunnel is 2.5 miles long (longest in North America), is one way, and can accommodate both cars/trucks as well as trains. It was apparently built during WW2 to provide Anchorage with access to a deep water port - as big ships were unable to enter the Anchorage port directly. To this day, cruise ships enter Whittier and passengers are bussed to Anchorage as they are unable to reach anchorage directly.
Whittier is an interesting little town - It’s primary purpose now-a-days is to service the cruise ships and it is bustling with life in the summer, shops & restaurants as well as inns & homes cover the little down. In the winter however, everyone who stays (which is only a few hundred) close up their summer homes and converge on a giant building that was built as a barracks in WW2. Everyone basically lives in the same single building all winter. Power is spotty in the winter and the cost to heat the homes is high - but the single building is more efficient and has backups for everything. The tunnel apparently closes quite often in the winter as well - so ppl rely on neighbors for staples they ran out of while they wait for the tunnel to reopen. We found this out from our lead guide, who had grown up in Wittier and had fond memories of roaming the halls of the barracks in the winter with the other kids. Sound both super fun and then very boring very quickly…
2015-08-22
Our trip started by loading our kayaks onto a small landing craft and being shuttled out to the Harriman Fiord (or at least that’s where I think we went, I wasn’t using my tracking app back in the day). We were dropped off near a small stream where the Salmon were running!
We loaded up into the kayaks and we were paddling. The fiord was not particularly large, so we didn’t go far every day, and the coast line was such that it was pretty easy to setup camp wherever we wanted.
After a short paddle, we setup camp for the evening while our guides started cooking - we basically had three square meals a day cooked by these two, I’m confident I gained weight on this trip. After dinner, we saw an iceberg floating by and Derek and I headed out to grab some ice for cocktails. Derek had purchased a bottle of Yamazaki whiskey for me a few years prior (before they won the best whiskey in the world and the price soared) and we picked some blueberries to drop in for an informal Old Fashioned of sorts. Nothing like a $1000 bottle of whiskey cooled with 50-60 year old glacial ice sitting on a beach in Alaska!
Off to bed, excited about the days to come.
2015-08-23
The next day, we made our way along the coast in the direction of the tidal glaciers at the north end of the bay. We had a quick paddle in the morning, followed by lunch in a small inlet. The day was sunny, but a bit windy and the view from the water at the surrounding mountains was amazing.
Our guides got started on lunch, while we relaxed a bit. We soon realized that the bushes surrounding us were all blueberry bushes and we went on an expedition for the next hour or so to pick as many as we could.
Our journey took us up the foothills a little ways, but by the end we had quite the stash of blueberries! Our guides informed us that their were no bears here, but in retrospect I can’t imagine that was true - Bears could certainly access the area and there is plenty of food for them… Either way, we didn’t run into any so I can’t prove him wrong (thankfully).
Lunch was amazing as always - Our lead guide (who’s name I cannot remember) was an amazing camp chef. He was able to incorporate the berries into our meals for the next 2 days - living off the land (for like 1/10th of our calories)!
The afternoon paddle ended up being a bit of a bust. We started paddling and then the wind picked up, resulting in our basically paddling in place for half an hour or so. We gave up soon after and pulled back to the shore - only a few hundred feet from our lunch spot - and setup camp.
We had plans to make it to the glaciers the following morning, since we were unable to make it today. We did some more exploring and picked a few more berries before calling it a night.
2015-08-24
The next morning the wind was low and also in our favor and we paddled away in the direction of the glacial wall of Barry Glacier (I believe).
We ended up getting up there in no time and we setup a few thousand feet from the glacier to watch. It was noticeably colder this close to the glacier wall and there were lots of small icebergs in the water floating past us from the calving wall. We saw a few small chunks fall off the wall, but nothing huge. We were glad we were this far back though, anything closer and we would get hit by some huge waves if anything big fell off.
After the glacier, we made our way to a landfall for lunch near Coxe Glacier - which is just south of Barry Glacier. The end of the bay has a lot of cool waterfalls in addition to the glaciers - only one of which is a tidal glacier at this point.
Derek and I made use of the very fine glacial silt at the bottom of the glacier for some war paint - Angela/Diane thought we were ridiculous.
We hung out by the glacier for a good part of the afternoon - basking in the sun.
We hoped back into the kayaks in the early evening and made a short trip to our campsite right at the entrance to Barry Arm.
2015-08-25
We woke in the morning of day 4 and loaded up the kayaks for a mile(ish) trip to the head of Harriman Fiord where the beach lander was going to pick us up.
They lander arrived right on time, loading up our kayaks along with another group of backpackers that were picked up from across the bay. We headed back to Whittier - spotting a few rafts of Otters along the way. What an amazing place!
