On Thursday, our fifth full day on the Wilderness Adventurer, we woke up in yet another beautiful cove. Yeah, this really sucks.
We chose to go on a forest hike in the morning. The hike was on an old logging road, but let’s just say that no one had been doing any logging recently. Sometimes we were bushwhacking. Below is Dave walking on the trail.
This was definitely bear country. Where the trail was clear you could see bear scat about every ten feet. Here’s a lovely closeup of bear scat full of seeds, with attractive little mushroom things growing out of it. Yum!
Our guide Alex kept up a constant chatter: “Hey, Bear, Ho Bear.” We had been told early in the trip that the key was to stay noisy and to stay together, and the bears wouldn’t want anything to do with us.
On one side of us was dense forest, mostly Northern Hemlock. On the other side was lighter brush, and we could hear a rushing stream. Dave, always on the lookout for spawning salmon, wanted to scramble down to the stream and check it out. Alex, by this point accustomed to Dave wanting to wander off, did not object. Dave came back and said we had to come down. Three of us did – me, Alex and a young woman from Australia. When Dave first reached the stream, dozens of bald eagles took off when they saw him. By the time we got there, it was just the salmon…
…that is, until the Australian girl spotted the bears.
I believe that’s a yellow leaf on this bear, because it appears in several of my photos.
If you’re going to come upon bears suddenly, it’s really nice to have a stream and a safe distance between you and them. Below, you can see clearly that there is a mother and cub. I think there was another cub too.
When we got back up to the trail, we marked the spot with a branch for the group that would take the walk in the afternoon. We heard later that they decided it probably was not safe to go seeking out the bears. I should add that the day before, a group from our ship who really wanted to see bears had taken a jet boat out of Wrangell to a bear-viewing station, where they saw lots of bears from the safety of a tower. The jet boat later met us at Thom’s Place, the cove where we spent the afternoon. Dave and I decided that we didn’t need that particular adventure after all the adventures we had already had. But we were pretty excited to come upon some bears all by ourselves!
That afternoon we went on a guided paddle, meaning a group of kayaks went out together with a guide. Our guide for this paddle was Christina. I loved that we would sometimes see other crew members out and about. For instance, Christina’s kayak-mate was the pastry chef. Here they are below:
We kayaked along the edges of Shrimp Bay and Klu Bay, passing two waterfalls along the way. These photos are pretty self-explanatory.
As we reached the edge of the outer bay, Christina gave us a choice about whether to cross the bay or go back along the edge the way we came. No one but Dave spoke up, and he voted for crossing the bay. This was probably the wrong choice, as it required crossing an open body of water with a fairly swift current, and it definitely was the more strenuous one, but everyone dutifully crossed the bay and returned to the boat along the other edge.
Above, back at the boat, it’s practically Grand Central Station with kayaks going in and out.
The one above is good because we are pretty much paddling in unison, which wasn’t always the case.
After we got back to the ship, I tried stand-up paddleboarding. I debated for a while whether I really wanted to attempt this, after watching several novice paddleboarders struggling with the current.
OK, I’m not looking too smooth, but I’m concentrating mightily because the thought of going into the drink was not that appealing. Actually, once I got the hang of it, it wasn’t too hard. I’ll admit, however, that when the zodiacs returned from taking people hiking I was quick to drop to my knees before the wake reached me.
Late in the afternoon the Polar Bear Plunge took place, with many intrepid souls jumping or diving in. I chose to take photos from a zodiac nearby; there was zero chance of me voluntarily going into this water. Dave said it wasn’t bad at all – not much different from Maine, or Long Beach Island in the very early summer. I took his word for it and did not test it myself.
