We are enjoying our two-night stay at our rustic cabin at the Midnight Sun in Moose Pass. Our favorite part might be the pancake breakfasts that the owner, Chris, cooks up every morning in his home. He and his friends also cooks up stories about the hunting and fishing in Alaska to entertain the breakfast crowd. We learned a lot of things at breakfast here!
We used that breakfast education all day! Our cabin is 28 miles north of Seward, and we're heading that way for the day. Our first stop is the Kenai Fjords National Park office. Most of this national park is made up of the watery fjords and frozen glaciers in the bay. But we are stopping to take the Exit Glacier hike that is several miles inland. As we started the hike towards the glacier, we would find signs that signified where the end of the glacier was on certain random years. Back in 1917, we would have already arrived at the glacier.
Mark stood where the glacier was in 1926--the year his Father was born.
Another random year on the trail was 1961--the year that the four of us hikers were born. We've passed a lot of signs with still no sign of ice.
While Connie and Steven stayed on the trail, Denisa and Mark followed a sign that pointed to the "outwash plain." That's a fancy way to say "walking through the rocks along Exit Creek."
We got our first glimpse of Exit Glacier at about the same time we started seeing chunks of ice rolling down the creek. It's an interesting sound of ice cubes that are bigger than a bread box rolling down the water.
The creek deposited some of those cubes on the shore. This is an interesting hike!
When Mark tried to pick up one of those natural ice cubes, he found out that glacier ice is heavier than it looks.
It sprinkled on us, but we kept going as the views of Exit Glacier got bigger and better.
Denisa is standing in front of the red sign that indicates that hikers can't go any further. The risk of Exit Glacier dropping off chunks of bigger-than-a-bread-box ice and rocks is too dangerous to go closer.
We had to hike all the way back up the outwash plain to reconnect with the easier hiking paths in the park. As we hiked higher, we found the sign for where the toe of the glacier was just eleven years ago.
The rain has stopped, and we got our best and blue-est picture of Exit Glacier from the highest point on the trail.
As we hurried back to rejoin Connie and Steven, we noticed a crowd looking down into a ravine next to the trail. The cell phone picture is blurry, but we could clearly see a mother and baby moose right below us.
We got sprinkled on, but we finished our hike dry. After rejoining our travel companions, we headed into the town of Seward. We were in search of the whales we saw playing in Resurrection Bay a couple weeks ago. No luck with finding whales today, only seals. The main sea critters we saw were on our lunch plates--cod, halibut, and salmon. No pictures because we ate too fast since our pancake breakfast left us hungry by noon.
One mission today is finding LIVE salmon. At breakfast today, we got local advice from our local hunting/fishing source. The advice was spot on--drive five miles on Nash Road on the other side of the bay to Spring Creek. That's where we found a line of fishermen and fisherwomen casting over and over.
We talked to a man that told us the crowd was smaller than it was an hour ago. No one seemed to be catching right now, as the runs of fish come and go. They weren't catching while we watched, but we did get this picture of a salmon caught right before we arrived. We also missed seeing the mother and baby whales that entertained this line of fishermen about an hour earlier.
Our breakfast source also told us that the salmon were now showing up at Bear Creek Road. We visited here eleven days ago, when absolutely nothing was moving. Today, however, Bear Creek was filled with sockeye salmon.
With the ripples, and the light reflecting on the water, it's hard to take a picture of the fish. But these guys were lined up to swim under the Bear Creek bridge.
It's hard work swimming against the brisk current of the creek. Then they are faced with the waterfall at the fish wier. Here they must propel their bodies into the air to clear the step up to the higher level. You can see two salmon in the air in the picture below, trying to make that step closer to their spawning destination.
We found that we could watch fish jumping through the air for a very long time! We were cheering for them to make a successful jump, and then they must continue swimming hard to keep from getting dumped back down the waterfall again.
We pulled ourselves away from the salmon show to drive less than a mile further down the road to Bear Lake. According to our breakfast advice, this is the place that has been imprinted in their salmon brains where they began life, and the place they are to return to spawn.
When we walked down to the mouth of Bear Creek, we could see the shadows of a few of the strongest salmon that had made it through the rapids and were now in the still waters heading into the lake. Watching the process of fish returning home after several years, is another of God's wonders that we have gotten to wander into.
At breakfast we learned that the fish were behind schedule this year, waiting for the local creeks to warm. They have been content to hang out in the ocean a little longer waiting for summer. It feels like our salmon education day was completed!
According to what we learned at breakfast, we needed to be back at Seward around 4:30-5:30 to see the fishing charter boats returning from a successful day on the open seas. Watching this was on Steven's Alaska bucket list. Steven got his picture with one of boat's harvest for the day.
Denisa had to ask why this rockfish eyes were so bugged out. The resident expert told her that this was a deep water fish, and the process of pulling it up to the top of the water quickly can make the eyes bug out. He added that if you went from deep water to the surface fast, your eyes would do the same thing. We learned another piece of our fish education.
We also watched as they weighed some of the halibut. This young man will have stories to tell at school next year about the 76-pound fish he caught in Alaska that was almost as tall as he is.
We might have stayed in Seward longer, but this was the coolest, wettest day we have had since Connie and Steven arrived. So we opted for an earlier arrival back to our cabin in Moose Pass. We had an evening of popcorn, and we watched movies that were available for free at our host's house. We can hardly wait for tomorrow morning so we can learn more at breakfast.
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