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Eye to Eye with a Lynx

Hiking in Alaska's Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, whales and porpoises in Resurrection Bay and a paddle to the Aialik Glacier, this week in Walk About Martinez.

We were eye to eye with a lynx and it stared straight back at us no more than ten feet away. No fear.  Running down the trail from Skilak Lookout, Roman and I had startled it but it had simply moved off trail, ambled up onto a log and stood there looking at us both.  It was a beautiful animal, mottled brown fur, as large as a young German Shepherd but with distinctively drooping lynx “whiskers” and it was sinuously feline in its movements.  Walking with a deliberate almost taut lethargy, it wasn’t expending any extra energy on us but could have sprung into action in a heartbeat.  His eyes carried most of his intensity and seemed to look right through us both.

Our reactions were different.  After the initial surprise of being face to face with this magnificent animal I was fumbling for my camera and Roman whispering excitedly that he couldn’t believe that it hadn’t run away.  In true predator fashion it never took its eyes off us and we stared straight back.  Here in the heart of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, we were not a threat.  He seemed to see into our primate souls and recognize neither threat nor prey and after getting his fill of us, slowly ambled off into the bush.  Wow!

Katie and I and our friends Dwynne and Roman, have several weeks to explore as much of Alaska as we can get to in an RV.  Our first stop after Anchorage has been to visit the Kenai Peninsula.  We started with the little log cabin filled town of Hope on Turnagain Arm, where we simply pulled over by the side of the road when the view wouldn’t let us go any further and stayed for the night.  From our nearly deserted roadside pullout, we looked down the Arm into the snow covered Chugach Mountains, watching the tides rise and fall.  We needed the time to wind down and found the lonely road and stunning view to be just the place.  

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The following day we drove to a campground near Skilak Lake and hiked the Lookout Trail, a five mile loop to a spectacular vista over the lake and into the glacial clad Kenai Mountains.  The trail is a moderate uphill for the first two miles, rutted in places, but the last half mile is steep.  Katie and Dwynne gave it an overall rating of moderate with a few difficult spots.  

It is worth every bit of effort, however.  For almost all of it you hike with a view.  Most is an old forest burn area and the fire has cleared the view shed.  Where fires in California or Arizona leave a devastated landscape for many years, the extreme lushness of Alaska’s summers has made this burn, beautiful.  The intense green of leaves and fern fronds become a verdant background to the lovely stands of purple lupin, cow parsnip, yellow paintbrush, valerian and flowers I have yet to learn.  It is just plain soothing to a Californian’s dry eyes.  At the end of the trail at the top of the lookout, a glacial vista opens of mountains, fields of ice and snow, forests and tundra and an intensely blue lake.  U shaped canyons and hanging valleys weave toward us from all directions, converging on Skilak Lake, tinted a deep turquoise blue by glacial flour, now varicolored, dappled with the shadow’s of clouds.

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Hiking through this wildlife refuge meant that around any bend in the trail we might encounter moose, bear, mountain lion or lynx.  Running is not recommended in the Alaskan Bush as humans tend to look more like prey when we run.  But the excitement Roman and I both felt for the place had us galloping most of the five mile trail like 12 year olds.  The great beauty all around just set us off all the more.  The air was cool and moist in the meadows, and I’ve never run so effortlessly.  The scent of life was thick and it just felt right to run.  I made as much noise as I could, breathing loudly and talking.  I have no desire to startle a brown bear and her cubs or a bull moose who might just wipe the up the trail with me in one swift movement of his antlers, but these two primates just had to run.  It’s at times like this that I feel the joy of being a monkey who can’t help playing in and loving his environment.  Have you ever seen Jane Goodall’s movies of the wild chimpanzees going ape at the first rain?  She called it a rain dance.  Sheer unmitigated joy!  That’s what we felt.

Nearing sixty, Roman and I should have gotten over this many years ago but it still lives and breathes in us both.  So we ran up the trail and down right into that lynx which wasn’t running and just got out of our way, but had no intention of running from either of us.  It did look awfully intensely at us.  Sized us up and maybe figured two old geezer monkeys weren’t anything to get excited over, but we sure got excited over that cat.  I can tell a lynx from a mountain lion or a house cat but I don’t know if it was young or old, sick or healthy.  It was just beautiful.   A marvelous start to our exploration of the Kenai.

Then it was out to the coast for several days, the first near Ninilchik where we stayed in a campground on the beach and spent hours watching bald eagles feed on fish bones mixed into the tidal wrack on the beach.  The following day we moved on to Homer and took several beautiful hikes on the Homestead and Crossman Ridge Trails, both through boreal forests, meadows and flowers to knock your socks off, and fabulous views across Cook Inlet.  After hiking we found great food at the Mermaid Cafe in Homer if you’re up for local, fresh and seafood!  www.mermaidcafe.net 

 

We’re driving to Seward as I type.  Forest and tundra clad mountains, ribboned in snow fields on all sides.  Kenai Lake is a bright glacial flour blue-green and swamps and lily pad tarns unfold around every bend.  It’s raining lightly as we follow the summer’s landscape over the Iditerod’s route toward Seward, past wisps and tongues of fog which lick the avalanche chutes and valleys to the tops of the peaks.  It’s magical and the car is full of audible oohs and aahs.  A bald eagle swoops across the road as we drive.

The next morning we are up at six -- slate grey skies and a light rain falling -- to meet our paddle guide Johnny, who’s with Kayak Adventures Worldwide in Seward.  www.kayakak.com  We’ve paddled in the rain many times on Vancouver Island and elsewhere but there’s always a touch of trepidation when donning our kayak gear on a rainy day.  

We're taking a water taxi forty miles with about twenty others, all of whom will be dropped off before us at deserted beaches or at a boat-in-only resort.  Our group is going to the end of the line today to an island kayak launching site.  We’ll spend the day paddling through the ice to visit the actively calving Aialik Glacier.   What we’ve heard is that the ride in the water taxi is half the fun.  It can take two and a half hours or four depending on just how much is worth stopping for.

Before we’ve even gotten out of Resurrection Bay the shout of “Whale!” goes up and Captain Dawn slows the boat.  I’ve seen whales many times before but when I saw the disturbance on the water ahead I thought it was a small water spout, a kind of dust devil at sea.  Nope, it was the plume of a spouting humpback, blowhole blasting its hot moist breath high into the cold ocean air.  It spouted, breathed, showed us its back and repeated this three times as it filled its lungs for a dive.  Then in one final flourish, tilted itself, flukes up and disappeared.  They’re intelligent animals and if they knew how excited their displays made everyone on that boat they’d probably do it again.  

But that was only the start.  Off to the side of the boat a quarter mile away we saw explosions on the surface of the water and the captain again slowed the boat to about ten knots.  A school of Dall’s Porpoises was wildly feeding in the distance.  Our boat’s change in speed was all the enticement they needed.  It was like yelling “I dare ya, ya chicken!”  In what seemed like only a few seconds that school of play hungry mammals was at the bow bursting from the water with such force that I had to cover my camera from their spray and splashes again and again as they swam circles around us, surfed our wake, or just sped along in front staying just under the flat landing barge bow.  People lay elbow to elbow like packed sardines along the square bow, heads over the front to see the show these beautiful creatures presented. 

It was all obviously play for the porpoises.  You could feel the unfettered joy they experienced at having a boat to race against, a boat who just dared them to come and play.  It was speed tag with a captain and a big piece of floating aluminum and they loved it.  The captain seemed to love it too and Dawn didn’t drop her smile.  I braced myself at the gunnel shooting up a storm of pictures just as excited as the Dall's and everyone on that boat was stoked by the spectacle.  It’s one good reason to take a smaller water taxi when moving around the coasts of Alaska.  You’re so close you get wet if you want to.  We even caught a whiff of fish every now and then.  Breath of the Gods!

We experienced these wonderful porpoise extravaganzas three or four times on the way out and several more times on the way back, the final show being the best when six or seven just wouldn’t leave us.   Eye to eye with us at times they seemed aware of us and not just the boat.  Our heads hanging over the side were the real treat, communion at speed.  

Later that day on an even smaller boat which we had all to ourselves, our return skipper would be Captain Real from Montreal who happens to be married to Captain Dawn.  What a couple.  They love skippering, love the coasts they ply and made it so much fun for all aboard.  They brought us to bald eagles, puffins, kittiwake rookeries, basking Steller Sea Lions, more whales and porpoises and several groups of sea otters, also known as a family, romp or raft of otters.  Great words!  Both captains seemed connected to all that swam, floated, flew or just lazed about.  

The ride to our island launch site didn’t take the two plus hours we’d been told it might, it was over four.  Because of this, rather than shorten our kayaking, Johnny arranged for a later pickup.  All good by us as now the real adventure began.

The forecast had been for rain off and on all day but it had stopped as we got underway in Seward.  When we hit open water the grey began to break and we got a few “sucker holes” of blue.  By the time we disembarked for our paddle we could hear thunder in the distance but it wasn’t coming from the rapidly clearing skies it was coming from the glacier which was calving ice bergs.  Not just a hint of thunder, these were loud, deep and ominous sounds from a river of ice maybe six miles away.

Our paddle guide Johnny, spent quite a bit of time while on the water taxi and then on the beach, teaching and instructing.  He talked of bear care -- as brown and black bear are potentially anywhere on land -- paddle safety and technique and gave us all kinds of information about glaciers, the Aialik in particular and pretty much every aspect of the wild you could ask to learn.  He was fascinating.  Several times he bowed out, thinking he was talking too much but the babble was too good to miss and we asked him to go on talking.  We’ve all been wilderness kayaking for many years but we still learned plenty.  

All launched, we stood out toward nearby Slate Island and eased along its west side until we hit the first thick flows of “bergy bits,” ice up to the size of a barrel.  From barrel size to that of a van were the “growlers” and anything bigger was a true iceberg.  We had to keep our distance from the growlers and real bergs which could turn over on a whim, possibly capsizing a boat paddling too close.  Lounging on the bigger bits and bergs were seals, catching rays on a day that had cleared up entirely.  The few remaining clouds were background decoration for the surrounding snow capped mountains that rose in all directions.

The floating ice field was fun, the bits bumping aside as we made a path through their midst, but the towering glacier -- the edge of an eons old river of ice -- was truly magnificent.  A mile across and towering hundreds of feet on its face, it dwarfed a large double decker tour boat that came within a quarter mile of it.  Even the great splashes of the calving ice were bigger than the tour boat which listed to one side or the other depending on where all the passengers crowded together for the view.

We eased ourselves through the bergs, finally breaking into open water as the breeze of the glacier blew the ice toward open water.  We watched, scanning the rugged face for breaking ice and when it happened, called to the other boats with a direction and then waited for the thunder, always delayed from the calving event itself.  

The Aialik Glacier is a great tongue of ice, a slowly flowing river fed by the Harding Icefield which is over 600 miles square, forming a frozen plateau at the tops of the Kenai Mountains.  It feeds many glaciers, some receding dramatically while others, like the Aialik, seem to be maintaining their terminal positions so far in the face of global warming.  Whether they will in the future is doubtful given the current plight of most other glacial ice worldwide which is receding rapidly.  

The immensity of the Aialik truly came home when I viewed a tiny group of people on the beach in silhouette against the ice and when the tour boat moved across the face, minuscule to the mass.  The forces of our planet and its scale relative to us seem palpable when staring into that immensity of blue and white ice age grandeur.  Those people were dwarfed by the Aialik which in turn is small next to its mother, the Harding Icefield, and that is just a fraction of the size of the great icesheets over Antarctica and Greenland.  And yet we are being felt.  We are having a disproportionate influence on this beautiful home planet or ours.  Small primates on a beach looking up in wonder.   We are so many and so hungry that like locusts capable of devastating a landscape our unrestrained use of resources is causing what may be the quickest climate change the planet has ever experienced.  

On the beach we talked of this change with Johnny while we had lunch to the ever present thundering of ice and then paddled back in time for our pick up.  The ride home was just as spectacular as the ride out but we were all bushed and only the explosion of porpoises as we re-entered Resurrection Bay was enough to revive some of the weary.  

The RV we were vacationing in, the boat we used to motor forty miles to visit a glacier and the very plastic of the kayaks themselves, all hasten the catastrophe.  Yet eco-tourism is part of the solution in areas where the alternatives for a population are exploitation and decimation of the very resources people may come to see.  And the value of education can't be dismissed either.  People need to see these majestic spots if there is any hope of building support for change, a big part of the reason for National Parks in my view.  

But I still dance when I’m on a trail or on the water.  I still love this place and the experience of being alive and aware in it.  I’m sure that life on the planet will survive but it will no doubt be altered in dramatic ways, greatly affecting the wary stare we two primates shared with a lynx.  

“Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.”  John Muir

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