Travelers' Tales Alaska by Bill Sherwonit Page B

the coast.
    â€œOnce they hit fresh water,” Twigg noted, “salmon are basically living off themselves.”
    While the creek reeked of death, life rolled merrily along out in the open bay. As we headed back at day’s end, a lone sea otter did a slow float about thirty feet ahead of us. He was munching clams. We could hear the crack of shells breaking against a stone on his belly. Sea otters don’t produce blubber; they depend on their thick coats for warmth. To keep the hairs from matting and losing insulation, they groom constantly andexecute barrel roll after barrel roll.
    â€œSea otters and kayaks have played a big role in Alaska,” Twigg said, as we fought a slight headwind and our escort kept easy pace, snacking away. “The Russians basically enslaved the Natives into hunting otters.” After Vitus Bering’s voyage of discovery in 1741, the Chinese developed an insatiable appetite for otter fur. Overhunted in the Kenai, sea otters have since recovered and are as valuable today as they once were, not for fur, but for Alaska’s tourism industry. That brings its own threats. At Seward, the marina has swelled to 550 slips and now accommodates jumbo cruise ships. With more traffic on the bay, veteran guides admit it’s getting harder to find wildlife.
    I dodge big tourism by begging off Seward’s renovated Best Western in favor of the Van Gilder Hotel, a Victorian-era remnant listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Instead of cable TV and in-room coffee, the Van Gilder offers a walk-up room with antique furniture and lots of character. I half expect to look out my window and see gas lamps lighting the way for sourdoughs as they stagger out of honky-tonk saloons.
    Don Nelson, who gave up wildcatting on the North Slope ten years ago and opened the hotel with his wife, says the new breed of cruise-ship tourists are apt to hop on a day-trip charter bus to Denali as soon as they hit shore. “It isn’t like before,” he says. “They used to rent a car and go off exploring.”
    I have done my own exploring by driving here from Anchorage via Portage Glacier, then down seventy-five miles of highway through a flume of mountains. Portage Glacier is one of Alaska’s top attractions, but more because of its proximity to Anchorage than any inherent grandeur. Exit Glacier, near Seward, has the knee-buckling grandeur.
    I pull into the parking lot of Exit Glacier on a drizzlymorning. The sun is straining to bust through the cloud cover—a “sucker hole,” as local pilots call such tantalizing breaks in bad weather. Two short loop trails go to the base of the glacier; another winds four miles uphill. The latter parallels this protruding tongue of the Harding Icefield, a frozen desert that straddles Kenai Fjords National Park and Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. It sprawls over 700 square miles, blanketing the lower Kenai halfway to Homer.
    I place my bets on the icefield trail, and it turns out to be a lucky day for suckers. The clouds lift. The panoramic views pull into focus. I’ve hit the hiking jackpot. The trail climbs through thickets of cottonwood and alder, then through clusters of red salmonberry and pink fireweed. Up and up. Subalpine meadow surrenders to alpine tundra. I bump into Don and Debbie Muggli, a Seattle-area couple who gave themselves an Alaska vacation as a twenty-fifth-anniversary present. Don’s a hunter and bear buff. He points toward a sunny patch of green on the opposite mountainside, about a half mile away.
    â€œThere are two bears up there,” he says. “Any meadow like that, they dink around up there.”
    I get out my binoculars. Sure enough. Two black bears are on their hind legs, locked in playful embrace. Dinking around. Don figures they’re yearlings, since they don’t have the baggy coats of adult males.
    â€œThey haven’t got a care in the world,” he adds. “Who’s