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From: Keith Kaste <kkaste_at_slip.net> subject: [Paddlewise] Alaska Trip Report Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 08:55:23 -0700 · This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:32:50 PDT

To the north from Kodiak Island there is a little settlement, Chilkak.
There a powerful old man created man and woman.  At first the old man
planned to create them out of stone but when he lifted the man he
accidentally broke his left leg.  Then he decided to make people out of
earth.  This is the reason men die, for earth decays.  Were we created
out of stone we would live forever.  Many children were born to them.
So the husband and his wife began to worry, "Shall we stay here?  There
are going to be so many men in Chilkak we are not going to have enough
birds for our parkas."  So the first Chugach began assembling a pile of
sand.  He gave it a long, narrow shape with two seats and said to the
old man, "You are powerful.  You have created us.  Cause this to turn
into something in which we could swim in on the sea."  The old man
fulfilled the wish and that was the first two-seated kayak.  (Chugach
legend.)

The kayaking portion of our Alaskan vacation began in Seldovia on the
Kenai Peninsula.  We learned in the museums that the first people on the
North American continent came over from Asia about 10,000 years ago.
Some of the ancestors of the Inuit people continued along through the
Canadian arctic region and made Greenland their home.  Some of the
forebears of the Aleut and Inuit people settled in Alaska.  Now I stood
on the shore of Kachemak Bay.  The kayak is an ancient boat, and in
ancient times kayaks plied these waters.  I was jazzed.

Long ago, but less ancient, Russians plied these waters, as well.  They
also rode in kayaks.  But Aleuts did the paddling and the hunting.  The
Russians cashed in on the abundant sea otter furs to be found here.  It
took them about 120 years to bring the sea otter to the brink of
extinction, then they sold the land to the US and left.  Not many
Russian names remain, with one notable exception:  baidarka.  We saw no
baidarkas where we paddled, saw very few modern kayaks either, but I
swore I could feel the spirit of the native people swirling around us in
the wind under the raven’s wing.

We wanted to find out more about Seldovia and this Russian Church
standing on a little hill in town, but when we returned from our hike to
the beach the bookstore was closed.  We stayed at a bed and breakfast
along the old board walk.  Most of it and the town was wiped out by the
massive earthquake of the early ‘60’s.  We watched as the tide went out
and continued going out.  It didn’t stop going out until the level was
24 feet below the high tide mark.  As we experienced this phenomenon
over the next couple days we became acutely aware of the restless motion
of ebb and flow.  Equally astounding was the length of the day.  Sunset
was around 11:30 PM and sunrise was somewhere around 3:00 AM.  It never
got dark enough to use a flashlight.

During the night a big wind storm whipped up.  In the morning we decided
it would be better for us to go overland to Jakalof Bay to launch rather
than take the more open stretch from Seldovia.  There were white caps,
but the seas appeared to be less than 3 feet.  We decided it was safe
enough to put our modern day skin boats on the water.  Our Feathercraft
K-Lights handled the following seas quite well.  We don’t usually have
these boats in choppy conditions (that honor goes to our hard shells),
but the relatively wide beam, flexible frame,  and the ballast of
camping gear made the ride quite tolerable.  We stopped at Cohen Island
for lunch.  Walking the beach we were confronted by a black
oystercatcher with a long needle-like red beak and eyes with red rings
around them.  He was making a shrill shriek like an 8 year old girl at
an amusement park.  Looking like he was ready to pick a fight with my
sandaled feet, we gave him wide berth. After lunch we launched into
still choppy seas and rounded the point into Neptune Cove.  There sea
otters were basking and munching in the calmer waters.  We were pleased
to find no other people.  We stayed two nights.

There were two eagle’s nests in the trees near our tent, but it wasn’t
until we took a walk to the other side of the beach that we actually saw
a nest.  It is a huge affair made of some good camp fire sized pieces of
wood.  It was high in a pine tree and the tree was on a hill above the
beach, but with their crazy laugh, the eagles signaled us we were
trespassing.  We retraced our steps back down the beach before setting
out our lunch.  There we saw something that I thought was astounding.  I
watched a raven fly past me with something in its mouth.  It flew up
high and then dropped its treasure.  I guessed even ravens get clumsy
sometimes.  Then it did it again, and again.  I saw that the thing in
the raven’s mouth was a mussel.  It was trying to break open the mussel
by dropping it on the stones below!  How did this bird discover this
process?  Later on, in a different area I saw another raven doing this,
so it is a teachable behavior.

Halibut Cove is a town along the shore of Ismalof Island and the
mainland.  Main street is the narrow strait between the two.  Row boats,
kayaks, skiffs, supply boats and even float planes move across this
water.  Halibut Cove is the home of nearly 50 residents, seemingly many
of whom are artists.  We paddled up to The Quiet Place Lodge and asked
if there was a vacancy.  We were their first ever drop in guests.  We
stayed two nights in Halibut Cove paddling and hiking around.  When we
got back to Homer we had a little bit of time to visit the Pratt
Museum.  It has good displays showing the local wild life.  There are
four remote control cameras set up on Gull Island out in Kachemak Bay.
Two of them are high on the rocks where the birds perch.  Another is set
up in a puffin’s burrow.  The other one (not working at the time) is set
up in the intertidal zone and is submerged part of the time.  You can
switch from camera to camera and control them with a joy stick.  Each
camera also has a microphone to pick up the ambient sounds.

The next day we were on a train to Whittier.  After seeing the water
taxi prices in the Homer area we were shocked at what they were charging
out here in the Prince William Sound.  I’m tempted to go into detail on
this subject, but I’ll just shut up.  No one was forcing us to use their
service.  We could have paddled the extra 25 miles ourselves to and from
Whittier and not paid anyone to get us in closer to our destination.  We
were happy to have the extra time to relax.

Our destination was Blackstone Bay, a fjord actually.  It is the home of
two tidewater glaciers: Beloit and Blackstone.  There are other glaciers
in the bay, but I don’t think any of the others make it all the way to
the water.  The view was awesome as we paddled toward Willard Island.
The lofty snow capped peaks rising from the glaciers seemed like
sentinels to some arctic deity.  We felt like we were sneaking in the
hall of a sleeping giant.  We paddled to the southern tip of the island
and set up camp, where the temperature was at least 10 degrees colder
than at the mouth of the bay.  The spot is just right for two people
during a neap tide.  During a spring tide it is under water.
Unmistakable was the sound of ice calving off the glaciers.  We knew
that’s what it was but we could’ve sworn it was thunder.  It was
continuous all through the Alaskan twilight (usually known as night).

In the morning we packed a lunch and headed off to Blackstone Glacier.
There was a lot more ice in the water than the day before; noisy ice, it
was crackling.  The closer we paddled, the denser the ice became.  We
had to swerve and weave through the "bergy bits".  Here’s where a
K-Light is handy, because of its great maneuverability.  We saw seals
hauled out on one of the larger bergs.  The magnitude of Blackstone
Glacier is hard to describe.  Its fractured south face rises hundreds of
feet out of the chilly waters.  Great icy rift valleys run upward into
the ice field above.  There is a huge sheer cliff of black rock
(probably where the name came from), that the glacier traverses over on
high, transitioning into the west face.  Waterfalls that must be over
200 feet high stream off the top of the cliff, as well as elsewhere.
Its beauty was fierce, stunning.  It is not at all a light-hearted
thing.  It is a giant gnarly moving beast.  The ice on the faces are
white and baby blue.  It’s not the warm and fuzzy baby blue of your
friend’s one-year-old’s pajamas.  It’s a cold and deathly baby blue that
says, "Climb your mountains, swim your seas, but there is no death more
assured than trying to touch me."  You might try to picture someone up
there, but you know no one would ever give it serious thought.  Then
suddenly, boom!  Tons of ice explode from over a hundred feet up in a
huge white cascade.  The splash of water roars back up to where the ice
calved.  The thunder reverberates and might trigger more calving.  If
you want to feel puny, go to Blackstone Glacier.

Rain visited us for the first time that night.  It came down pretty
hard, but by morning it had tapered to a mist.  We set up our parawing
as a vestibule in front of the tent and fixed breakfast.  After all, we
were on an island and had seen no sign of bears.  We launched our boats
warm and dry and began an easy circumnavigation of Willard Island.  In
the morning we paddled to the pick up spot and folded up our boats.  By
the time the water taxi arrived we had converted everything to luggage.

The next day we went to Anchorage and visited the museum.  We only had a
couple hours, but we saw quite a lot. They had a full scale depiction of
how the Aleuts lived in their earth bermed dwellings.  Though I saw no
skin boats out on the water, I saw a number of baidarka frames at the
museum and throughout my Alaskan visit.  Of note to me was how wide and
short these boats were.  They seemed to be on the order of 30 inches
wide and maybe 14 or 15 feet long.  I came away with the impression that
the bifurcated bow is actually a stylized handle for a two person carry.
A number of boats had bows with a circular hole through them in the
neighborhood of 4 to 6 inches in diameter.  This really seemed to be an
aid for carrying.  A lot of baidarkas seemed to be propelled by a single
bladed paddle like those used for a canoe.  What  double bladed paddles
I saw were narrower than their Greenland cousins and quite thick all the
way down to the tip.  I saw one depiction of a three hole baidarka in
which the rear holes were occupied by paddlers, and the forward hole was
occupied by a hunter.  I was concentrating on Aleut culture, but all the
native cultures were represented.  The Athabaskens had a cool partially
decked solo canoe constructed similar to an umiak.

The license plates say "Alaska, The Last Frontier".  That’s a fitting
motto.  There were a lot of analogies to that other frontier known as
Baja.  We would have liked to have time to travel to Kodiak and
Unalaska, so I’m sure we’ll be back.  Alaska is a worth while
destination for a kayaker here in the land where it all began.

Keith Kaste

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