Tripping Over Wildlife

Originally published by Adventure Collection

*Moose family in Alaska. Photo by Erick Rock. ©Natural Habitat Adventures.*

FOG LIFTS

“In this weather, you’d step on a moose before you’d see one.”

Larry Benz was standing with his hands on his hips, squinting out the glass doors of his hand-built cabin at the northern boundary of Chugach National Park, Alaska. The usual, sweeping vista of yellow and chartreuse pines was veiled in a thick morning fog.

I had landed in Anchorage the night before, thanks to a flight bought with miles and free time. College graduation had just released me into the wild, and while I was taking my time picking a purpose, I thought I’d visit a friend’s family up north and pick blueberries.

Within an hour, we had parked Larry’s truck on the side of an empty two-lane highway and were crouched among bushes on sloping hills in the mist. We plucked dew-covered berries by the handful, plopping them into our mouths, and occasionally into tiny wooden buckets slung over our shoulders.

By the time we returned to the cabin, damp from our morning excursion, the fog was sliding out of the valley. I stood on the porch, filling my lungs with crisp, piney air, watching the forest appear like splashes of green and yellow paint on the landscape. In the distance, the dissipating fog revealed a white mound, parked at the mouth of the valley.

I slipped back into the cabin, intent on shedding my rain shell and taking a hot shower. In half an hour I reemerged, warm and clean, to find a clear sky, and a fractured, pale glacier shimmering in the sunlight. Everything was quiet and still — like we were the only living beings in these woods. Of course, we were anything but.

SILVERS RUN

There were copious numbers of them, in shades of coral and red and even black, wriggling in the clear water. Their carcasses were piled along the banks of the Russian River: fat, rotting, and pink.

Alaska is the ninth biggest seafood-producing region on earth, due in large part to its hefty numbers of salmon. Fishermen in Alaska have their pick of salmon species — Chinook, or “king” salmon, run from May to July; sockeye join from June to July; red, pink and chum salmon follow from July to August; and coho “silver” salmon round out the salmon season from July to October.

We were fishing for silvers, which was a tease of an endeavor. It was past spawning season for most salmon, which meant that as we stood in the river in our squeaky boots and olive-green fishing waders, hundreds of Chinook and sockeye and chum wiggled all around us, all past their prime.

I watched in awe as foot-long, hook-jawed fish swam in the crystal clear, glacier-melt waters just inches from my boots. I spent most of the day staring either at them or at the mountains peeking above the forest, catching next to nothing, and napping in the boat we used to float down the river.

*Photo by Erick Rock. ©Natural Habitat Adventures.*

Come late afternoon, a few locals joined the salmon buffet: Just before sunset, we spotted a lumbering brown bear and three of her cubs picking their way along the riverbanks just upstream of us. I stood motionless, watching the mom wade across the rushing water as her cubs approached the river’s edge, more nervous than I.

One by one, the little ones hopped in and scrabbled across the low rapids and rocks, while mom sunk her nose into one of the salmon we had largely failed to catch all day.

LIFE ABOUNDS

The amount of wildlife in Alaska astounds me.

Running into a family of brown bears at the river is, as the Benz family happily informed me, par for the course. Alaska boasts the trinity of North American bear species: black, brown — known as Grizzlies in the Interior — and polar.

*Otters and glaciers in Prince William Sound. Photo by Sabine Bergmann.*

But bears are only the beginning: Out on the Alaskan tundra, there are caribou and arctic foxes and wolves. Climbing along the ridges of the mountains are Dall sheep and mountain goats. Soaring in the skies are bald and golden eagles, peregrine falcons and osprey.

Then, as I discovered on a day cruise on Prince William Sound, there’s an incredible amount of life in Alaska’s coasts and waterways too, including puffins, walruses, orca and humpback whales.

After a day of marveling at the thunderbolt cracks of calving ice and views of otters gliding on their backs before glaciers, I was ready to go back to my favorite Alaskan home base — the cozy cabin in the woods. I was hankering for a well-earned dinner of fresh-caught silver salmon marinated in teriyaki.

MORNINGS MESMERIZE

Mere minutes into breakfast, my fingertips were stained purple. Our fresh-baked bread bled warm blueberry juice onto my skin as I pulled off hunks to dip in my coffee.

In a blueberry trance, I stepped out the back door to go to my second favorite viewing platform on the property, after the porch — the three-walled outhouse. But after taking five steps out into the misty morning, I stopped in my tracks, shocked awake.

A massive, deep brown shape shifted a dozen feet away. The creature twisted a heavy head around, looking over the hump of its shoulders, its brown eyes shining, its bulbous nose exhaling clouds of white breath into the morning air.

For an electric couple of minutes, we stared into each other’s eyes, breathing slowly. Then, as if out of boredom, the animal lowered its snout to the ground, and continued to eat.

I picked my way through the foggy forest, toward the outhouse, laughing when I remembered Larry’s warning from the week before:

“In this weather, you’d step on a moose before you’d see one.”