Fox Creek and Inian Islands
The morning light is diffused with fog and mist. The air is calm, and the surface of the sea looks silver. When a humpback whale surfaces, it is a black shape etched on the sea, and we can hear the chuff, as it blows. Even the little marbled murrelets stand out against this background, and as we quietly drift to watch more whales, we can hear them too. Our morning has begun.
We are on Idaho Inlet, an arm of the sea that stretches from Icy Straits into Chichagof Island, at a place called Fox Creek. Soon it will be time for kayakers to paddle the shoreline, taking advantage of their quiet mode of travel to get views of harbor seals hauled out on the rocks, eagles on the shoreline, Steller sea lions and intertidal creatures. From a kayak, the great explosive breath of whales through the mist is dramatic. Our voices can barely compete when a whale starts “trumpeting” like a boat horn in the distance.
The hikes all start on a long curve of shoreline, and some groups walk with pauses to look at shells and rocks at the high tide line, or creatures in tidepools. They taste wild edibles, beach greens and oyster plant leaves, before turning to walk through blooming beach meadows and into the forest. Everyone takes some time under the tall canopy of spruce and hemlock, past blueberry and devil’s club. Here, a slow stroll is a rich experience, with pauses to listen to the long Pacific wren song, to look at wildflowers, squirrel homes, and bear tracks in mud, or to marvel at perennial bear tracks, a place where bears have been walking in their own footprints until their passing is etched in the moss of the forest floor. A fast hike can take one further; up the hillside, to a peat bog where trees grow like a bonsai garden, and where we see a whole new collection of plants in bloom. For those with strong legs and an explorer’s spirit, this hike might even become a route-finding mountain-traversing epic experience.
Afternoon brings us to the Inian Islands, and a much anticipated Zodiac cruise. We are on the wild edge, where the Gulf of Alaska meets the Inside Passage. Where the deep wide water of the Outer Coast squeezes itself through relatively narrow openings twice each day as tides move in and out, to fill or drain thousands of miles of fjords and bays. Everything is stirred up, and minerals are brought from the depths to feed surface phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain. It is food soup, if you are a marine creature. And everybody who is anybody is here: Steller sea lions, sea otters, humpback whales, marbled murrelets, bald eagles, pelagic cormorants, pigeon guillemots. We find both kinds of puffins, tufted and horned, and a lucky few even spot an ancient murrelet.
Then it is back to the ship, dry clothes and dinner, before we’re back out on deck again, ending our day as it started, watching humpback whales. If this day were a sandwich, with the wildlife as layers and the wildflowers for garnish, it would be twenty stories tall.
