The hiking trail was wide and forgiving, nothing like the steep, log-jammed path we had bushwacked the day before, but I couldn’t suppress a tingle of apprehension. The way Alaskans talk, you can meet up with ursus horribilis, the Alaska brown or grizzly bear, on a trip to the store.
Suddenly the ragged line of a dozen hikers came to a halt. Jordan Hess, our young guide, had spotted a raptor in a dead spruce 75 yards away. You could make out a touch of orange or red. So it wasn’t a bald eagle, a creature that carries its own folkloric menace in Alaska. (I heard one about an eagle that had snatched up a tourist’s dachshund from beside a gas station). Jordan dashed up a berm for a closer view. Then he was back, grinning.
“I’m afraid it’s a robin,” he said.
Well, it was a large western race robin, but the point is that even on tour in one of the last wild places in America, there are warm cuddly moments. I spent five days in the rugged Kenai Peninsula on a tour that combined raft trips across a wave-tossed lake and down a gentle river, a trailside lunch in the drizzle and a candlelit salmon feast in a remote lodge.
When it comes to outdoor adventure, Alaska has something for everyone. You can scout the magnificent coast from a cruise ship, pay large sums to stalk grizzly, photograph seabirds in the Pribilofs, climb Mt. McKinley, tumble through white-water canyons. I’ll put up with a frisson of peril, if I don’t have to live in a tent. That’s why I chose Alaska Wildland Adventures, an eco-friendly outfitter that offered certain comforts in the land of the bear and the moose.
On a dazzling day in early June, I flew into Anchorage, and the next morning caught a 40-minute hop across Cook Inlet to the Kenai Peninsula. Noting my destination, the ticket agent told me cheerily about an experienced hiker who had been killed in Kenai a week before by a brown bear as the man heated water for his lunch. On the Funny River yet. It gave me an opening gambit for Jordan, the guide, when he met the group at the Kenai airport.
“He should’ve carried bear mace and not a gun,” he said with a shrug. We were off in a van to the Kenai River. My companions for five days and four nights would be a doctor, his wife and 13-year-old son from Kalamazoo, Mich.; a naval flight surgeon and her husband from San Diego; a young Georgia grandmother, and a honeymoon couple from Berkeley, Calif. At Cooper Landing, we geared up for a raft trip on the Kenai, donning jackets, gloves, rain gear.
Back home I’d left behind a heat wave; here, the watchword was layers. The gentle 5-knot Kenai is not one of Alaska’s whitewater rivers, but Jordan warned us that you can be lulled to sleep by the soothing ride and tumble into water so cold that hypothermia can claim you in minutes.
As we flowed down river in two rafts, with guides handling the rowing, we trained cameras and binoculars on eagle’s nests, pairs of darting mergansers, dark-striped goldeneye and harlequin ducks. Around us loomed dark burly peaks still topped with snow. Just after lunch (on the wooded shoreline), the lead raft passed a bear, briefly glimpsed in the brush; then, in a scene out of Disney, a moose waded into the river before us, escorting a spindly offspring.
Adventure takes many forms on safari, but what happened next does not appear in the brochures. We were to leave the river and cross Skilak Lake to our night’s lodging, some 6 miles away. Facing a cold drizzle and mounting waves, the guides debated whether to take a longer, safer route, partly by land.
We put in. On the rain-lashed waters, the two motor-driven rafts bounced like matchboxes, and a chill wind blew down from Skilak Glacier. We were swathed in thermal jackets and wool caps. But my teeth were clacking like a Tahitian drum. Brian, the Kalamazoo boy, looked forlorn and blue, and I did not detect a captainly confidence in the faces of the two guides. We finally rounded a point into calmer water, and when we pulled up to shore, I made a dash for the wood stove in the lodge.
If the lake crossing was a bad move (and some of the staff acknowledged it was), the Kenai Backcountry Lodge was the perfect salve. Set back from a gravelly beach and cocooned by tall trees, the lodge can make you forget all worldy cares. It was built in the 1930s as a hunting lodge, and recent improvements by Alaska Wildlife Adventures have not altered its log-sided charm.
You can sit on the deck and gaze onto the endlessly changing lake, relax in the book-lined rafters, or dine at long tables on meals that are poetic in their simplicity: blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast, dinners of charcoaled sockeye salmon, orange-scented couscous and rosemary wheat rolls.
Strung out through the lichened forest are two log cabins and a series of Yukon Cabin Tents, novel 15- by 20-foot A-frames with walls of white canvas and pine paneling. Each has two beds, a propane heater and a propane lamp. A narrow boardwalk leads to the bathhouse, with flushing toilets and hot showers. You fall asleep to the sound of a rivulet rushing by the door–or the patter of rain on canvas roof. Plopped down in this genteel rusticity, you can do as you wish — go kayaking or boating, hang out at the sauna cabin, or join a hike up Cottonwood Creek Trail into the teeth of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.
We all took the hike, armed with Alaska bear-meeting etiquette: make noise, stay in groups, and if you’re attacked, curl up and play dead. As we started up the trail, Jordan spat out a stream of “Yo, bear! Hey, bear!”
“I’d be thinking more about moose,” the lone Alaskan traveler in the group muttered to me. “They can be dangerous, and they’re certainly more plentiful. You never want to get between a mama moose and her young.”
We picked and squirmed our way along a trail piled with fallen logs, or deadfall, the result of winter winds that had raked the mountainside. We got up and down the trail in three hours without incident — unless you count the rain that sent some of us into a bower of spruce to eat a picnic lunch.
Wildlife? We saw the retreating flutter of a spruce grouse, piles of wolf scat and a “signpost” that Jordan pointed out — a strip of bark torn away from a cottonwood with a few hairs clinging to it: A territorial bear had left its calling card.
In Alaska, even the fish stories sound scary. Over dinner of grilled sockeye salmon in the lodge, a guide told of seeing a sockeye — the most aggressive of the salmon family — jump off a hook and rip a fisherman’s jaw. Hearing about all these wild things only made me appreciate the gentler critters around us — red squirrels, so much more vivid than the gray squirrels back home; a lone robin that showed up in front of the lodge, probing for grubs; the varied thrush with its metallic telephone ring of a call; swallows chasing mosquitoes in the evening sky. On the morning we packed up and recrossed the lake, the water was as serene as it had been surly two days before. Our base the last two nights was the Kenai Riverside Lodge, a string of cabins spread beside the river, just off a highway. Missing was the splendid isolation (and imaginative menu) of the backcountry lodge, and yet raw nature was still at hand. After dinner I strolled by the river and watched in awe as a pair of immense bald eagles settled into a tall cottonwood overhead. At breakfast, Debbie the Georgia grandmother told us a breathless tale. Tiptoeing out of her cabin at 5 a.m. to call home from an outdoor phone, she had confronted a moose and its young, staring her down.
Too stricken to scream, she waited it out until the pair ambled off.
And yet you had the feeling it was the memento she was waiting to take home.
One morning we drove to Seward and boarded a boat to tour Kenai Fjords National Park, a flock of islets, fiords and glaciers with the best viewing on the coast. We watched in rapt stillness as orca (killer) whales and migrating humpbacks leaped and plumed; harbor seals played in the floes at the foot of Aialik Glacier, and shards of ice broke off and crashed into the water; colonies of steller’s sea lions sunned on big rocks, hard by the dorky lovable puffins and long conga lines of murres, ducking one by one into the depths.
And what of ursus horribilis — the raison d’etre for many tourists, the star of almost every travel story written on Alaska? Other than a few distant sightings, we were blanked, bageled.
“Bears overrated,” I scribbled in my notebook, knowing that tourists are helicoptered to bear habitats like Katmai and Brooks for an easy look. I didn’t mind. No, the Alaska I would cherish was better summed up on the drive back to Anchorage the last morning.
There in a marshy stretch beside the road, a wading moose had attracted a small crowd of motorists. Getting out for a closer look, I saw two trumpeter swans swimming straight at the moose. “They must be protecting their nest,” an Alaska man opined. As the swans quickened their pace, you could hear their trumpeting call, and then the startled moose turned tail and swam off. You could see the vignette as a wilderness cartoon. But to me it was also a vivid and illuminating postcard of Alaska, a place both threatening and tender.
IF YOU GO
THE DETAILS
A five-day Kenai Backcountry Safari with Alaska Wildland Adventures runs $1,795-$1,895 per person. Kenai is often piggy-backed with Denali National Park to the north of Anchorage — more rugged, mountainous and bear-filled than Kenai. Eight- and 10-day safaris include both parks. Ask about special senior and family tours.
Contact: Alaska Wildland Adventures, Box 389, Girdwood, AK 99587; 800-334-8730. Web site is www.alaskawildland.com.
You can also book the trip with American Wilderness Experience, a seasoned Boulder, Colo., adventure operator that plans outdoorsy tours all over the West and in Central America. Contact A.W.E. at 2820-A Wilderness Place, Boulder, CO; 800-444-0099. Web site is www.gorptravel.com.
Another outfit that organizes five-day tours of the Kenai Peninsula is Adventure Alaska, based in Homer. You start and finish in Anchorage, using mostly cabins and not lodges — a fact that’s reflected in the lower cost: $1,425 per person. Phone 800-365-7057. Web site is www.info@AdventureAlaskaTours.com
All prices are per person, double. Air fare is extra for all tours.
— D.B.
