2005/07 Alaska and Back Again - Prince William Sound |
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Wednesday July 27th
It was still drizzling early as we went 90 miles back towards Anchorage to get through the tunnel to Whittier for the glacier cruise. This took us past the Portage Glacier, dimly visible through the clouds. It was still drizzling at the tunnel, but as it goes through a mountain range, the weather is often different at each end of the tunnel, so we had hopes of improvement.
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Kenai Peninsula (Portage Glacier, Prince William Sound) |
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The tunnel was built by the military in World War II for trains to connect the port of Whittier with the rest of Alaska. A few years ago the tunnel was upgraded to allow road traffic too, but it’s only one-way and even that has to be shared with the trains. All the traffic has to line up for a scheduled time just like for a ferry, and then when it’s time, the cars and trucks are metered into the tunnel at fixed intervals. The tunnel’s three miles long and narrow so the driver just has to focus on the lights in front and ignore the walls and track.
As predicted, the weather at the other end was different: it was heavy rain instead of drizzle! We and far too many other people dived into this tiny café to wait for the boat. Whittier is an odd place. It has the usual few tourist shops on the quay, and two enormous and ugly buildings from the 1940s, one of them a high-rise apartment block where Whittier’s whole population lives.
The Klondike Express is a large catamaran taking hundreds of passengers, most of whom have
come by cruise ship or excursion train or bus. We were assigned seats in the middle, so not a great viewpoint unless we went up on deck. As it was still cold and wet, and the boat was cruising at 46 knots, about 50 miles per hour, you had to really want to be on deck. The boat blasted across Prince William Sound and then visited a number of glaciers.
The area gets an enormous amount of rain and snow, and there were glaciers everywhere, flowing down from the
mountains. Most of these ended up in the sound as great walls of ice, tidewater glaciers with hearts of blue ice. Others ended at cliffs tops and waterfalls cascaded down the cliffs. We saw a couple of the glaciers “calving” when great slabs of ice would crash into the water.
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Prince William Sound (5.33) |
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There were seals and sea otters in the water amongst the ice floes. The sea otters float on their backs in groups called “rafts”, and eat shellfish they’ve brought up from the sea bed. There are apparently thousands of bald eagles in the Sound, and I saw a few overhead and even one floating past on its personal ice floe.
The scenery and wildlife were amazing, but the weather was mainly grim, and only those who were able to take the cold and wet and gale got their money’s worth. I stayed up on deck for the whole time, except for a few minutes below to eat the somewhat soggy haddock and chips they provided. John and Edna came up while the boat was stationary, but of course the deck was jam-packed then. I was having a struggle to keep the camera and lenses dry in the rain.
On the way back we stopped at a kittiwake gull colony, thousands of birds living on a cliff with waterfalls 
all around. Back in Whittier, it was still raining hard, so we quickly lined up for our return trip through the tunnel, though this time we had to wait for a train to go through first.
Back at the lodge at Portage Glacier, there was a restaurant which looked really tempting but it closed as we walked in, so we would have to find a spot to cook our own dinners, preferably out of the rain. Eventually we cooked our ham and cheese sarnies during a break in the rain, and then drove back to Sterling on what had turned into a beautiful evening. Along the Kenai River fishermen were standing shoulder to shoulder casting for salmon.