Back from the bush!

July 04, 2008

Filed in: Alaska

Okay, technically it’s not the bush we’re back from. The bush is interior Alaska, and we have been in (and are still in!) exterior Alaska, the coast, Kachemak Bay, but for the rest of the world in the lower 48, it counts as the bush, so I’m stealing it unfairly as my blog post title.

Too overwhelmed to tell it all—also a few scant hours of sleep/non-sleep away from our big bear/tiny plane adventure (gulp, yeah, we’re going forward with it, fears and economy be damned), but here are some bullet points for random digestion in the meantime:

* If there’s a state population center more generic than Anchorage, Alaska, with a spectacular mountainous getaway region closer than the Kenai peninsula, I’d like to hear about it. I’m being unfair, because we stayed in a disgusting airport motel south of the city and left from there, but everything I’ve read tells me we missed very little and perhaps nothing by skipping Anchorage. But either way, it’s almost impossible to describe how quickly the city and indeed all civilization falls away and you are driving through some of the most amazing terrain of your life. Snow-capped mountains, trecherous turns, staggering vistas, it’s all there, 30 mins or less from the city.

* Off the grid with the teen and tween: On the one hand, yeah, we were faking it, we had cabins with hard wooden planks rather than, say, a tent and the cabin had propane heat, so it barely counts. On the other hand, we were at the ends (or one end, anyway) of the world, Internet-free, electricity-free, people-free, noise-free, medical-help-free (see below) and C was only able to pull up one or two bars of service on his iPhone, and that was sitting on the railing of his cabin, hanging out by a hair’s breadth off the cliffs and into Kachemak Bay. Does that count as “off the grid”? I’m gonna give it to us, even if we were cheating a bit.

* Stuff we did that i was afraid/psyched to do:  You guys, I hiked 2 miles into the Alaskan wilderness, put on the most unbelievable amount of gear (rain paints (!), polypro inner layer, North Face jacket, wool sox, hiking boots, rubber overboots, armpit-high waders, Patagonia rain jacket, rubber gloves, floatation device [has anyone else noticed they no longer call them “life preservers”?]) and flobbered into an inflatable kayak and paddled past these huge floating chunks of glacier to the face of an active glacier. It was what counts in Alaska as a boiling hot day and every now and then there’d be a huge sharp crack echoing through the otherwise complete silence, some chunk of ice calving off of some bigger piece. The newly calved pieces are so so blue, this strange almost threateningly beautiful kind of blue that doesn’t otherwise occur in nature. Mesmerizing. After awhile you have to look away, for fear you will abandon your suburban life for something altogether wilder. Anyhow, we survived: no one drowned, no one was eathen by bears.

* Wildlife we have seen thus far: Bald eagles (tons! they never lose their amazingness, every single one is a thrill, in fact I’m embarrassed to admit they make me feel like bursting into tears. Does this make me a patriot?), spruce grouse (and chicks!), arctic terns (actually trying to peck us to death as we inadvertently walked over their nesting grounds), sea otters, western jays, tufted puffins, horned puffins, harbor seals, pigeon guillemots (sp?), and these little western shrew thingies that are pretty much more common than mosquitoes but 2,000 times cuter. They look like every PetCo in America released all its hamsters into the wilderness at the same moment, only they’re even cuter than that.

* The bad news: SOMEbody, the same somebody who dragged everyone out of his wilderness cabin this morning for a way-too-early un-guide-assisted hike, busted up her knee big-time, causing us to hobble down the sheer cliff-face one painful misstep at a time in the rain (I would love to write “pouring rain” to make it even more dramatic, but in fact it was only a drizzle.) We weren’t in any actual danger of the life-threatening variety, but we felt that way a little bit for the two hours we were out there, ranger-free and wounded in the wilderness. Now we’re in some cruddy roadside motel in Homer AK and the feeling of remoteness and danger are both receding, even in the stabbing pain in our middle-aged kneecap is not.

More later. Must arise in 6 hours to mount the tiny plane to view the vicious bears at close range. What’s scarier, that or taking a newly reconnected teenager away once again from his wi-fi?