Valdez, AK. Elevation 98 feet. Monday July 22, 2024-High 50s/Overcast and rainy. Sunrise: 4:55 am/Sunset: 10:46 pm. 17 hours and 50 minutes of daylight.

The small boat was painted greenish blue with an outline of a seal sketched in black on the starboard side. It was docked in a slip at the Valdez harbor and at 23 feet was a little longer than the Shasta trailer we camped in when I was a kid. We found this unusual lodging on Air BnB and booked it for two nights. It slept three and didn’t have running water.

Before we boarded the boat, we took in the view and checked out the harbor facilities. It was late Sunday afternoon, and the fishing boats were coming in. Most seemed to be personal or charter boats.

Near the harbormaster’s office was a public area with long counters and overhead water hoses with spray attachments for fish cleaning. Heads, guts, and bones were washed onto a slide area that ended in a chute that emptied into a container in the harbor. A row of attentive gulls and crows (some of my only bird sightings while in Alaska) kept a close watch on the activities ready to snatch whatever they could.

A whiteboard hanging nearby kept a daily and overall tally of the summer’s fish derbies which included halibut and silver salmon.

The harbor and adjacent village are situated on the Valdez Arm of Prince WIlliam Sound (PWS) in the northeast portion of the sound. We came in over the Chugach Mountains via the Richardson Highway and in the final thirty miles we crossed the summit of Thompson Pass (at 2805 feet it averages 500 inches of snow per year) and saw waterfalls and glaciers at almost every curve in the road.

My reading during the trip included the memoir The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost by Marybeth Holleman. She describes the location of Prince William Sound:

It is a place of convergence–the geographic center for Alaska and the Pacific, where the Arctic to the north, Aleutians to the west, and Inside Passage to the south all intersect.

Holleman arrived in Alaska a few years prior to the Exxon Valdez oil spill and spent those years and many after the disaster kayaking or boating on the sound and camping on its beaches. The spill spread oil throughout the sound killing thousands of fish and animals. Her story recounts not only the toll on marine life but also on the humans who lived, worked, and recreated in this unique and pristine environment.

The timeline (see below) provided by NOAA was thumbtacked on a bulletin board at the harbormaster’s building. It shows the status of PWS species recovery 25 years after the spill. Another ten years has now passed, and I wonder if anything has changed especially for those on the bottom row.

In the evening, we returned to the boat where we had loaded our backpacks and suitcases. The sunny evening and a big salmon dinner kept us going even though we were all fighting colds that I caught first and had now moved on to Dave and Dad. We found the accommodations challenging but not impossible. A bench, one folding chair and, a big cooler with four cupholders was our living room. An extension cord gave us all a place to charge our phones and one bright light, but we never did figure out how to turn on the string of party lights.

Back on the damp boat for our second night we consoled ourselves that it was still better than sleeping in a tent. And I said, “If we survive this, we’ll look back on it as an adventure.” But I’m not sure I convinced anyone. Everyone’s spirits seemed to lift a bit the next morning when we carefully disembarked the boat through its small door for the last time.

I confess I was also beginning to feel melancholy about the trip. Since our first brief trip to Alaska back in 2000 I had looked forward to returning, hoping that we would be able to make the trip with Dad, and now it was almost over.

So, it wasn’t long before I began thinking about a return visit somewhere down the road. I’m still not sold on the Inside Passage cruises that are so popular but maybe a flight to Anchorage and another trip on the Alaska Railroad–south to Seward with a with a stop in Whittier to get a look at the other side of Prince WIlliam Sound. And maybe this time I’ll see some tufted puffins.

Denali National Park. Elevation 1746 feet at the Visitor Center. Thursday July 18, 2024-High 50s/Partly Cloudy Sunrise: 4:40 am/Sunset: 11:43 pm. 19 hours and 4 minutes of daylight.

On this trip to Alaska just like the one in 2000, we started our trip in Anchorage and took the Alaska Railroad to Denali National Park and then on to Fairbanks. We spent one night in Denali and had had several hours before our train the next day. That gave us time for a short hike and ranger talk near the visitor center and then a bus trip over to the sled dog facility to see the Denali Park dogs and a demo.

It reminded me of the dog we had when I was a kid. Her name was Punkin, Punk for short. She was black with pumpkin-colored eyebrows and chest markings. Dad told me that Mom picked her out at the pound at Fort Richardson in Anchorage where they were stationed. Dad and I recently found Punk’s first rabies certificate, signed by the Army veterinarian, in his old wooden footlocker.

Punk was still a puppy when I showed up and she wasn’t happy that all of the attention shifted to the new baby. She took to pulling my diapers off the clothesline. Eventually we would become buddies, but she was always a backyard dog, and I’m afraid we never paid enough attention to her.

The dogs at Denali are freight dogs, bred to pull heavy loads–they haul everything from supplies for trail building projects to equipment for scientific experiments. Built for work, they have long legs, big compact paws (to minimize ice balls), and thick coats. Although the AKC doesn’t formally recognize the Alaskan Husky, they are a distinct breed.

The Denali dogs welcomed us with wagging tails. Many of them came close enough to be petted by the day’s second wave of visitors (there would be total of three demos that day). Once they heard the wheeled cart being readied for the demo their attention shifted, and the howls started. They all wanted to participate in the short run, but only four of the twenty or so dogs would be chosen.

Punk died when I was fifteen, our last tie to those brief years in Alaska. I saw a dog at Denali yesterday with the same eyebrows and remembered our sweet old family dog.

We left Alaska before my first birthday. It was a long car trip; Punk and I rode together in the backseat of the blue ’56 Ford all the way to Kansas.

In preparation for my trip to Alaska I reread Seth Kantner’s novel Ordinary Wolves. It’s about a boy named Cutuk growing up in the Alaskan wilderness. This time around I especially enjoyed his vivid writing about wildlife. Wolves, of course, but also his description of the life of a bull moose, who had spent the winter hanging around his igloo “for company in the lonely winter, the way moose often did.”

And now it’s autumn and the big moose has been killed for its enormous rack, little more than a trophy, and Cutuk wishes the hunter,

” . . .could feel the other 364 days a year the moose had fought to live. How it felt to survive birth in the willows while brown bears waited; winter stands beside his mother against the wolves; survive years alone in wading deep snows, the willows buried, the tundra howling wind; survive the spring crust that dropped moose to their ribs while it supported big hungry bears; and the summer insanity of mosquitoes driving him to his eyeballs into water. All for the cool sweet fall and the chance of mating.”

On my last trip to Alaska in the summer of 2000 the only wildlife I saw was the above pictured moose. She was grazing next to the road, just being a moose. It was thrilling and was the highlight of an all too short trip.