Puffins and Glaciers and Bears—Woo Hoo!

Greetings from the airport in Anchorage, where there is FREE wireless and where I’m waiting for the red-eye flight that will take me to Minneapolis, then Detroit, and then to State College. (And how 'bout those Nittany Lions, by the way??? I finally heard the results of the Notre Dame game this afternoon when we returned to civilization.)

We’ve done so much in the two or three days since my last blog entry that I can’t begin to do it justice. So, once again, I’ll just blow through some highlights and include a bunch of photos:

Earlier in the week—don’t ask me when; I have no clue anymore—we did an all-day, small-boat cruise of the Kenai Fjords south of Seward. I think I mentioned that in an earlier entry. Kenai (pronounced KEY-ni, with a long "i") Fjords was made a national park in 1980, in the same Congressional act that changed the name of McKinley National Park to Denali and made Wrangell-St. Elias a national park as well.

The trip was billed as “captain’s choice," in that the boat captain decides where to go in order to see the best stuff. The captain—a woman named Andrea, not to be confused with our NatHab guide Andrea—asked us at the outset what we’d like to see, and we all called out stuff like puffins, sea otters, whales, calving glaciers, and so on. (Along with a few wise-guy requests like giraffes and rhinos.)

I had hoped to see puffins, and got my wish: Quite often we’d happen upon a bunch of them just bobbing on the water. Here’s a tufted puffin, I think, although I get them confused with horned puffins, and we saw both kinds.

The captain has a biology degree of some sort and teaches this stuff for a living—she just captains a boat during the summer months—so she was great at finding wildlife and telling us about their habits. She led us to red-faced cormorants and kittiwakes, among other seabirds, as well as a number of small pods of orcas, like these guys:

We also drifted past the occasional rock coated in Steller's sea lions:

They reminded me of the sea lions I saw in the Galapagos (also on a Natural Habitat Adventures trip, come to think of it), especially in the way they bellow and belch and growl. They sound like a bunch of teenagers having a burping contest.

The boat excursion took the better part of the day. We returned to Seward late in the afternoon, spent the night there, then headed up toward Anchorage the next morning. On the way out of Seward we made a stop at Exit Glacier, which is also part of Kenai Fjords National Park. It’s a glacier that you can easily hike to. Like many glaciers, it has been retreating rapidly in the past century or more, and in fact there are signs along the trail that mark where the edge of the glacier used to be:

Here’s a shot of some folks hiking to and from the glacier, just to give you a sense of how big it is:

And here are Ron and Carol, a pair of NatHab trip members from South San Francisco, standing as close to Exit Glacier as you can get:

After Exit Glacier, and a stop at Portage Glacier, we headed north to Anchorage, where we spent the night. The next morning we set off for the finale of our two-week trip: a visit to Katmai National Park to see its famed brown bears. I'll make those the subject of a separate posting.