Ideal Cove and Petersburg
After a night of slow travel down Stevens Passage and Frederick Sound, we arrived in the vicinity of Mitkof Island. On the lower part of the island we anchored and landed in the exceedingly low tide, with sticky mud and large sea stars and crabs. Immediately after, we began a series of hikes into the well-kept forest, along a board walk. This piece of forest is an old-growth forest, with a board walk, where we found a good number of salmonberry plants, blueberry bushes and enormous devil’s club plants. These plants are covered with hard spines, but are a very medicinal plant.
After these hikes, we headed back to the ship and sailed off to Petersburg, a lovely, non-touristic town, founded by Norwegians some time ago. Fishing is the local industry, and there are a decent number of fish packeries, as well as shrimp industries. Here we had dock walks, to see the different types of fishing boats, some bicycle along the town, while others took flights on floatplanes to see Le Conte Glacier or visited the bog on Kupreanof Island, where we saw a good number of plants proper to that environment. The most interesting, of course, were the sundews, small insect catching plants, with small filaments dotted with a sticky substance, unto which small insects adhere, and become digested! Part of the boardwalk is being substituted by yellow cedar, which should last much longer.
