Alaska – Gravel, Grandeur & Goofy Grins (Part 9)

Wild animals, humans and motorcycles thoroughly mixed and mingled, it was time to make our way towards Seward.  On our way out of the wildlife park we came upon a rather wheezy looking caribou.  With  his head hanging low in an apparent weakened display of age and surrender, his impressive rack still was over the top of my head.  I stopped my bike beside him to take a picture and to give him the “oh you poor old boy” condolences when suddenly his head popped up.  He stiffened, snorted angrily and took a quick step towards me as to say “get lost or I’ll trample you into little pieces of Alaskan tundra.”  I was really started, nearly dropped my camera and almost fell off my bike.  OK then.  Note to self, old Alaskan caribou can still kick butt.  Give them a wide berth because they can be quite cranky.  Got it.  Oh, and luckily for me, Kim was behind me a fair bit and she saw nothing.  My dented male ego was to remain somewhat intact.

With that, we (actually I) expedited our exit from the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge and set course for our next stop, Seward.   We were quite psyched to be headed there because it is a seaport town and we had planned to go on a full day marine mammal/bird/glacier boat tour while we were there.  Continuing south and traveling along Turnagin Arm we were greeted with more ocean views and twisty roads.  The weather was good and in no time we made it to Seward and our hotel for the next couple of days.

By the way, if you don’t know, click on any one of the pictures in the gallery below and it will open that picture into a full size picture.  Then you can click your way through the remainder of the pictures in either direction in full size.

Now the hotel was not much to write home about, but it did offer some surprises.  As we entered the hotel’s lobby, we were immediately surrounded.  Surrounded?  Yes, as in surrounded by wild animals.  Completing our entrance through the one person revolving door we were immediately confronted by two bears, a musk ox and caribou!  In the hotel lobby!  This just after my run-in with the cranky old caribou.  Further in, we found moose, arctic fox, mink and pheasant.  Ge’ez, didn’t we just leave the conservation center?

Well what really happened is that all these animals were indeed in the hotel lobby but they were stuffed.  Perhaps they had been cranky with someone else and then they paid the price?  Oh well, it was just strange seeing all these animals in a hotel lobby, it wasn’t like we were in a hunting lodge.  We quickly “headed” to our room to drop off our gear.  We opened the door there and found…  no stuffed animals.

We put our gear in the room and decided to walk around the town a bit and get some dinner.  We found some murals painted on the sides of buildings which had been painted by the locals.  They showed topics such as the settling of Seward and some were about native Alaskan culture.  They were pretty cool so we snapped a few pictures for memories.  Then we did the tourist thing for a while, checked out a few shops in town and finally settled in for the evening, because we had a full day boat tour with an early start in the morning.

The following morning dawned bright and mostly sunny with fairly calm seas.  It was going to be a good day for a boat tour.  Actually, the boat was more of a ship.  It was a 95 foot vessel with twin 3600 horsepower engines.  She could make well over 26 knots with a full capacity.  This was no little boat.  By the way, I know the vessel facts for reasons I’ll tell you about later.

To ensure we got good seating, we arrived early and plopped ourselves down in the cabin by the windows.  I was sitting there reading my Kindle which at the time was a fairly new device.  The Captain of the ship walked by and asked if I was in fact reading a Kindle and I replied that I was.  We chatted about it and I let him look at it.  It turned out that he wrote software in his spare time, and the e-ink technology was a hot topic so he wanted to see how it looked on the screen.  We chatted a bit more about Alaska and the motorcycle ride we were on which he thought was pretty cool.  Ultimately, he said he had to get back to work and we thought we wouldn’t see him again.  We were wrong.

The boat departed on time and we headed out to sea.  Almost immediately we saw sea otters lolling about in the harbor, some lying on their backs sunning themselves while others rolled lazily like tops to help aerate their fur to aid in insulation.   They were as cute as you hear about and can imagine.  Clear of the harbor, the Captain laid on the power and 45 minutes later we arrived at two islands, one of which was a Steller Sea Lion rookery.  We laid up appropriately close and we could see the females with their cubs sunning themselves while the very large bull males made themselves know with loud vocalizations.  Every once in a while, there would be a bit of a dust up between the sea lions over space, but all in all, they seemed quite happy to lie in the sun and take an occasional dip in the water.   We watched for a half hour or so and it was time to move on.

Thirty minutes later, we arrived at two more islands, the Beehive Islands which were appropriately named because of their shape and one other thing.  The were bird rookeries for many species birds and they flew and swooped all around the islands making them seem like beehives inhabited by bees.  As we got closer to the islands, it became apparent that the islands were crammed with birds.  It looked like every tiny ledge, crevice and crack had a nesting bird or its partner sitting or standing on it. The walls to the island were quite sheer, so they’d stand or sit on very narrow precipices to be used as nesting areas.  There was very little free space by the time the birds had found all the spots they wanted to use.  It was quite amazing.

We watched the birds wheel and soar in the air around and above the island.  Had there been air traffic control, it would have been a controller’s worst nightmare!  But they all seemed to be able to navigate and fly without crashing into each other.  We humans aren’t so lucky.

After about thirty minutes of watching the birds act like bees it was time to find some whales and check out some glaciers.  Both of which we found and saw in abundance.  We’ll tell you about them and the little secret in Part 10.