North to Alaska

I returned from Alaska about midnight last night. What an adventure! I'm tired, but so glad I went--it was a great meeting, and Alaska is a really neat place.


The trip didn't start out promising, though. I got to Little Rock the night before I was to depart because I had a very early flight the next morning. Hope and the kids followed me up to Little Rock (I took a unit vehicle) and we spent some time on the town and at the swimming pool at my hotel before they returned to Monticello. I had just turned in for the night when the phone rang. It was Hope, who had found a message on our answering machine when she returned to the house--the airline had called, telling me the early flight had been cancelled, and that I needed to call and book a new flight! I scrambled to get a new flight via our federal travel agency, which was able to book me into Ketchikan by late Sunday. Whew!!


After some last minute schedule juggling at the Little Rock airport, I finally got out of town (three hours later than planned). After layovers in Dallas and Seattle, I arrived in Ketchikan about 9 p.m. that evening (Alaska time zone--this translates to midnight Central time zone). I woke up to the sounds of chirping birds and the faint light of dawn--roughly at 3:30 a.m.! Seems like the days are already pretty long here! After tossing around for a while and getting a little more sleep, I went downstairs in the hotel/lodge we were staying in to see if I could rustle up some breakfast. The restaurant didn't open for another hour, and the meeting didn't start until an hour after that, so I figured I'd walk into town, which was just down the hill, and see the sites and find a local cafe for breakfast.


As I headed into town, the most obvious feature on the landscape was a temporary one--the enormous cruise ship that had just entered town! That day (last Monday) was the first day of the cruise ship season, so the town was just gearing up for visitors.



The above picture was taken along a trail that led from our lodge into town. It is hard to express how large these ships are unless you see them in person. They carry many hundreds or even thousands of passengers--literally, small cities on water.


Since its large pulp and sawmills have closed, Ketchikan has tried to reinvent itself largely around tourism. Catering to a cruise ship-based industry is much different than what we saw in the Northwoods. There are over 40 jewelry shops, many featuring local arts and crafts, but many featuring high-end jewelry. There are remarkably few restaurants in town--most of the cruise passengers come in town to see the sights and buy some trinkets, then return to the ship for meals. The town comes to life when there's a boat docked, and virtually disappears when the docks are empty. This is also highly seasonal, so much of the winter and spring are very quite. The cruise companies apparently own a lot of the shops, and ship in the staff, so the local economy doesn't benefit as much as you may expect from this business. Times are still pretty tough in southeast Alaska...

Anyhow, one of the tourist districts is called "Creek Street", and consists of shops, restaurants, and homes perched on pilings over a small river that flows into town. The picture above is as the tide was coming in, so the stream's flow is barely noticeable. The boardwalks between the stores, though somewhat decayed, added a nice rustic charm that I'm sure the tourists just gobble up.

Another popular tourist spot is the totem pole garden by the lodge we stayed in (the building in the background of this picture is the meeting facility that we attended for these talks). These totems are hand-carved and decorated (more on this later).

The real highlight of the meeting was an overnight field tour. On Wednesday, we boarded a car ferry that goes between the islands in the Alaska panhandle. The ferry ride was interesting, although the cool weather and periodic rain showers and fog/haze kept us from seeing all there was to see:

It took us about three hours to run a few dozen miles from Ketchikan to Prince of Wales Island, the third largest island in the U.S. This island is largely federal land (the Tongass National Forest), with some state land, Native American corporation land, and scattered parcels of private property. Most of the virgin spruce, hemlock, and cedar forests have been logged off.

This picture is of a relatively large sawmill in the area (this region used to have larger sawmills and pulp mills until changing markets and the reduction in cut from federal lands closed many of them). This mill tends to produce Sitka spruce boards for speciality uses like musical instruments. Visiting a sawmill is an experience that stimulates all of the senses--there is a lot of activity happening, so things are always changing. It is very noisy (thank goodness for the earplugs). But perhaps the thing I'll remember the most is the smells--fresh cut spruce is amazingly fragrant!

The mill took large logs, cut a number of slabs off of them (some for chips, others to be cut into small boards), and then cut two large cants (big boards that will later be cut into smaller ones). I had some mixed emotions while watching this process--the logs they cut were from trees that were probably 200 to 300 years old or even older, parts of an old-growth forest now lost to time. The process was interesting to watch, and these were some of the few well-paying, dependable jobs in the area--vital to the local population.

Most of the forests of the area are still old-growth, so the region has much left in the way of ecological integrity. The cutover lands have yet to grow back enough to feed the local mills with sawlogs, and logging of the virgin timber on federal lands has almost ceased, so it will be an interesting next few decades as communities struggle to survive until timber supplies improve. The days of logging trucks like the one pictured above hauling massive western redcedar logs to this mill are likely numbered.

Western redcedar, which most of us think is used primarily for cedar siding like the materials on Mom and Dad's house and garage, is also primarily used for making totem poles. The decay resistance of this species allows for the totems to stand for a relatively long time in this temperate rain forest (Ketchikan gets over twelve feet of rain every year!). But even still, they don't last forever. The picture above is of a local carver who has been gradually replacing totems built in the 1930s and 1940s by CCC crews. They use mostly hand tools to make the totems--a long, arduous, and sometimes risky business.

The totems he is carving will replace those like the ones above, which were too decayed to remain standing. These totems are important parts of the native cultures in the area, and though they are proud of them, they are also reluctant to tell their detailed stories--those are property of those people, not fodder for tourists.

But what stories they must be!

We ended our day at a small remnant of old-growth on the island. These temperate rainforests are amazing for their profusion of life, and the piles of dead wood scattered throughout them. Moss and fungi seem to cover just about every inch of ground and vegetation. The stand was remarkably green, even though spring was just starting there, and the rich smell of decaying wood and needles was everywhere. The various size of trees and the dead, decaying wood are both important features of these structurally complex stands.

We spent the night in a small town call Craig (whose harbor is pictured below) before returning the next morning to catch a ferry back to Ketchikan and the rest of the meeting.

On our return cruise, we saw whales blowing in the distance, and a large fluke disappearing underwater. A small pod of porpoises followed our ferry for a while, and we saw plenty of eagles, ravens, and even a few black bears on our field trip. It's hard to image what you can see when you're really sightseeing!

The last part of the program before we left to return to the "South" as it is called was a short performance by a troupe of native dancers. Their colorful costumes and emphatic drum-based songs and dances were the perfect ending to a great trip!

My return yesterday was unremarkable--except for the fact that all my flights were on schedule, and the flying was smooth, all the way to Arkansas. I will long remember this trip--the views, the wildlife, the food, the whole experience makes me want to go back for an extended visit. Some day, when they're old enough, we'll take the kids on this adventure.