Seventy-four degrees! It got up to seventy-four degrees today under cloudless forever-blue skies. The snowy crown of Mt. Redoubt stood proud across the inlet this morning when I looked out, and all the lesser peaks lined up to show off their white tops, too.

Tide crest wasn't until 6:50 p.m. today, so we didn't go to Soldotna until midafternoon. Bob sat at the picnic table in the sun and made fishing lures in the morning, while I did mending and computer work.

There were almost no fishers on the fishwalk today. The fish were running. They jumped and splashed in the river, but were not taking bait. Toward tide crest three or four more folk came down to fish.

One woman passed behind Bob, took a place beyond him on the walk, and hooked a fish with her first cast. But it was an illegal snag, so she had to let it go. It had got hooked in a fin. After that nothing happened. Lines snapped; lures flashed over the river, and the salmon swam on.

I frittered away the hours walking around Soldotna. I walked the main roads and through residential neighborhoods, just sightseeing. The local library is always a good stop when wandering. I looked up a couple of words in their big dictionary, thumbed through some local interest books, and sent email. Then I walked some more.

Alaska runs on coffee, lots of coffee, lattes, cappuccinos, and just flavored coffees with maybe chocolate powder sprinkled on top. Little drive-up expresso canteens are plopped everywhere. They're in parking lots, along the roadsides, at gas stations. I must have walked past five or six of them today, at least. There were cars lined up at every one of them.
Some of the canteen buildings are quite clever, built as little log cabins or Victorian cottages. Most are stained clapboard with a gable roof, still quite attractive. They're tiny, about the size of a bathroom. There's just room for the expresso machine, the milk steamer, twenty bottles of flavoring syrup, and a frenzied operator. Coffee drinkers line up in their cars at windows on both sides of the building. And just in case you can't find a little building with an Expresso sign on the top, there are also expresso shops in strip malls and marketplaces for a caffeine fix. I feel we should probably drive up to one some day and have a latte as part of the Alaskan experience.

At seven, tide crest, Bob decided he'd lost enough flies and spinners for the day, and signaled me that he was ready to leave. We hauled his gear to the car, and headed back to Kenai.

I've had a meal of zucchini chili planned for days. We never get to it. By the time we get back from a day in Soldotna, I'm not interested in cooking and Bob is not interested in waiting for me to cook. Same thing tonight. Forget the zucchini chili; let's go out. There is a restaurant in a long log building right across from the campground and that's where we went. At 8:30 p.m., we were nearly the only folks in the restaurant. The service was slow, but the food was excellent.

Service was slow because the cook was talking with friends in the dining room, and didn't know that the waitress had put our order up. I was at the salad bar when I heard the waitress tell the cook that there was an order to fill. The surprised cook bustled out to the kitchen. It made me grin. I went back to the table and told Bob not to hold his breath for his meal. Didn't matter to him. He was wallowing in the fresh clam chowder on the salad bar. He ate so much of it that he took his chopped sirloin and steak fries home with him.

The sun was still high above Mt. Redoubt when we strolled back across the street to the campground at 9:30 p.m. and locked the door of Little Moby for the night.

Kenai, Alaska

The Great Spirit was still smiling on us today. We woke to clear skies and blazing sunshine. The sun, itself, had been up for quite a while before us. It pops back up over the river at around 3:00 a.m., after a few hours of bright twilight.

We dawdled over breakfast, and then went grocery shopping. Even with careful shopping, buying groceries up here is always a cash register shock for us Florida pensioners. We could say, “thank goodness for the salmon in the freezer,” but Bob figures at this point each salmon cost about forty dollars.

I put groceries away, organized the camper, and sent email while Bob again sat at the picnic table and made lures. After lunch I packed some books we had read into the backpack, smeared on sunscreen, and set out for an afternoon in Kenai. Bob and BlueVan went fishing again in Soldotna.

There was supposed to be a used bookstore in a strip mall a couple of miles from the campground. I had wanted to find it for days, but other fun got in the way. Tomorrow we leave Kenai. Today was the day for the bookstore search, and I found it. A small sign on a short storefront said, “Already Read.” That's my kind of talk.

Inside, shelves crammed with books go from the floors to the ceilings of three rooms. More books are piled in careless stacks all over the floor with only an alley among them to walk through. It was wonderful. Here and there a space is cleared in the mountain of books for a stool or old wooden chair you can sit on to better see the bottom shelves of books. I could have spent hours - days - there, but time was limited. So I started at Fiction, Letter A by Author, and skimmed the shelves hoping something I really wanted would pop out at me. Well, there were a lot of books I would have liked to have, but I finally settled on two I really wanted in my library and hadn't found, and traded my three books out of my backpack for them.

That done, I just walked around town and looked at houses and businesses for an hour or more, then stopped at the Kenai Visitor Center. There is a museum in the center that features native artifacts and there is also an art show by area artists entitled, “Bounty from the Sea.” Some of the art work is outstanding, and I envy the artists' skill. There were more native artifacts than I expected and I learned quite a bit, especially the details of how they made waterproof coats out of gut from seals and bears.

They beat the linings out of the gut with wooden paddles. Then they blew air into the resulting tube and tied the ends. These balloons were hung up in their houses to dry. When they were dry, the tube was cut to make a strip of waterproof fabric, and wrapped around a board. When enough strips were accumulated, they were sewn together to make the hooded coat. The resourcefulness of mankind is truly amazing.

The Kenai Visitor Center is also stop number one on an historic walking tour of Kenai, the third objective of my “afternoon out.” All the buildings on the tour have numbered plaques in front with short explanations on them, and there was further information in the tour guide I had. There were eighteen buildings on the tour, from 1881 to 1954. The 1894 white clapboard Russian Orthodox Church with bright blue onion copula finials is beautiful, and the crown of the tour. There are several log cabins, including the cabin of Moosemeat John, a prodigious hunter of moose to feed his thirteen children. Much of the walk was in view of the mountains and the sea. Gulls squawked; the breezes coming up over the bluff carried the tang of salt air. The life of Kenai is the life of the sea.

Homer, Alaska

It's nine o'clock in the evening. Bob is stirring up a soy loaf, like a meat loaf, for tomorrow's supper and sandwiches after that. Our hand-washed laundry is dripping on a line under the awning outside the camper door. I sit here typing and looking out of the camper window at the snow-creased mountains across Kachemak Bay here at Homer. That's in front of me. To my right, out the back window, Cook Inlet ripples in gradually darkening shades of blue to the horizon and on into the high bright overcast sky, streaked in white and blue like a watercolor painting.

It's only eighty-three miles from Kenai to Homer, so we got here about noon today and set up camp. The gal in the campground office said that getting organized at different camp sites must be like moving all the time. It is, sort of. The trailer has to be unhitched and leveled. The electricity, water, and/or sewer connections have to be done, depending on what amenities are available. The awning is rolled out, and the picnic table moved under it. Inside, the glass microwave turntable has to be unwrapped and put back in place. The dishes that we store in the microwave while camped have to be put back in there. The reading lamp goes up, and the electric multi-tap replaced. We have to unplug it, or it falls out from the trailer's bouncing down the road. The sink and stove are uncovered, and miscellaneous things that have fallen on the floor picked up. The restraining bars are taken off the front of the refrigerator shelves, the bathroom vent opened, and the water heater turned on. Then we're settled in.

There's a long hill from the campground into town, a couple of miles long, with mountain views all the way. The first stop after lunch, as it is everywhere we go, was the local tourist center. A lively young lady there gave us an overview of the town, a map of the town, and a brochure of all the art galleries and museums. We were all set to tour.

The first place we toured was the grocery store for fresh fruit and canned mushrooms. The “In” and “Out” signs on the doors were in English, and Russian. There are two Russian settlements just north of town, one of Orthodox Russians, and one of “Old Believers” who use modern technology, but still dress the old way. They live by fishing and subsistence farming. We saw several of them in the market. The women wore scarves on their heads and long dresses. The young girls wore the long dresses, but no scarves. The boys and men wore the traditional high-collared blouses with embroidered front plackets. Sometimes the collars were embroidered, too.

Scattered around Alaska are a number of small, old Russian Orthodox churches, like the one in Kenai, and all of them have active congregations. The Russian presence is still here.

From the super market we drove along the main street of town and looked around, and then down The Spit. The Spit is a five-mile long narrow stretch of land jutting out into Kachemak Bay. Touring companies, fish charters, gift shops, tackle shops, restaurants, bars, fish processing plants, docks for commercial and private boats, and an unbelievable number of campers, motor homes, tents, people, and cars are crammed onto a slice of land about two miles long and half a mile wide at the end of The Spit. It was absolutely fascinating.

There's a long narrow pond on The Spit surrounded by a shingle slope. The pond has an opening to the sea through which water pours in and out with the tides. It's called the Fishing Hole. The banks of it were lined today with fishers, and salmon jumped in the middle. Within minutes Bob was across the road at the Fish Shack buying a one-day license and a new supply of lures. His license isn't good until noon tomorrow, though. He'll have to wait before he can challenge the silver salmon.

We watched people fish at the Fishing Hole for a while. I walked along the stony slope to see what kinds of lures, lines, and weights people were using, while Bob studied the techniques of several fishermen. A couple of people caught fish, but with the number of salmon jumping in the middle, it seemed like everyone should be catching fish.

We had been told by a fellow from Kenai to be sure to stop at the Salty Dog. The Salty Dog is a bar made up of three historic cabins with a lighthouse in the center. We saw the Salty Dog. We looked in. It was a low-ceilinged smoky series of rooms full of young people drinking beer. Autographed dollar bills from tourists and locals hung from every beam and lintel. Shavings carpeted the floor in a thick layer. It definitely had personality. For us, it was “been there, done that.” Many bars with personalities like the Salty Dog had brightened our lives in years past. Maybe we'll stop there someday for old time's sake. I don't know.

From there we strolled along the spit, and stopped at the cleaning tables of a charter fishing outfit. Halibut hung from hooks along a rail, and silver salmon lay in piles on the cement deck. Successful fishermen took pictures of each other holding up salmon or standing beside a halibut while the fish cleaners patiently waited. Then they went to work.

Bob was taken by a young girl, in her twenties, who probably wielded the fastest filleting knife this side of Nome. The knives they use for those big fish are the size of butcher knives. This gal could slice out a forty-pound halibut in one minute flat, not waste any flesh, and not pick up a bone. The guys were good, but not as fast as she was. She just whipped through those fish. After three halibut, I lost interest. But Bob was fascinated by either the girl or her technique and stood mesmerized in front of the table full of dead fish parts. I sat down on a bench with a couple of tourists waiting for their fish, and we all watched a guy clean salmon. Same difference, but I didn't have to stand.

Bob finally tore himself away from the halibut cleaning, and we walked down to the maritime memorial to fishermen lost at sea. There was a large statue of a fisherman in his oilcloths under a gazebo roof, and plaques along the sides of the gazebo with the names of fishermen and women lost at sea. It was a somber place, backed by the sea and the mountains. Someone had placed a Christian cross on a lanyard around the statue's neck, a poignant statement of grief.

Homer, Alaska

The Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and the Kachemak Bay Research Reserve have a built a large, impressively designed public display building named the Alaska Islands and Ocean Visitor Center on the coast in downtown Homer. The purpose is to educate the public about the location and mission of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge.

All that factual information having been said, the important thing about the center is that it is a not-to-be missed fun time. To begin, the front doors are framed in a metal sculpture of bladder wrack seaweed that twines down around the door handles. Two-story high windows overlook the Kachemak Bay and Kenai Mountain range in the lobby, where you are greeted by a life-size sculpture of a walrus. The floor is a pattern of seashells and fish sculptured in cement. The elevator doors are framed in relief sculptures of seabirds. There are more than 120 sculptured seabirds in various exhibits. It's a veritable art gallery.

We pushed buttons, turned cards, listened to narratives, watched videos, and peeked into bird nests. Reports from field biologists were posted as they came in. The videos showed and told about the terrible weather, the cold, and hardships that biologists endured to monitor the over 500 miles of coast in the refuge. They work on remote islands, rugged coastlines, and steep mountainsides in breathtaking wilderness. It made you want to run right to the desk and sign up.

The Seabird Theater was the ultimate exhibit. Seabirds clung and nested on cliffs and rocky outcrops two stories high. An otter stood waiting to dive into the sea, and a harbor seal lounged on a rocky platform. Behind the rocks backlit movies of flying seabirds filled the sky. The cacophony of bird cries was deafening, and the smell cleaned out your sinuses.

We walked out of the museum into the landscape of sea and snow-capped mountains as if the experience didn't end at the visitor center doors, which it really didn't. A floating walkway led from the museum across Beluga Slough to the shore. It was exactly low tide when we reached the beach, and a mile of mud flats stretched out before us. Some surveyors were out on the flats doing their thing, and someone was even riding a horse out there. People have died on those flats in Cook Inlet. There are constant warnings about the twenty-eight-foot tides that cover the flats about every twelve hours. You need to know your tide tables before venturing too far out.

After lunch it was time for Bob to fish. A couple of miles above the start of The Spit, the five-mile long gravel bar out into the bay, Bob dropped me off on his way to the Fishing Hole. The first miles I walked were at the trailing edge of the town of Homer and I passed small businesses and stores. One pawn and antique shop, the Crow's Nest, was closed. I was surprised, until I read the sign taped to the door. “2 Nice 2 Be Inside 2 day.” That's right. It was a spectacular day of dazzling sunshine and temps all the way to seventy degrees.
Near the head of The Spit I crossed a causeway dividing Beluga Slough from Beluga Lake. Beluga Slough is a huge salt-water marsh along the east side of Homer. We walked the northern end of it this morning behind the museum, and now I was at the southern end. Beluga Lake is a staging area for float planes, and I got a close look at several parked right next to the causeway.

Then I was on The Spit Bike Trail and off the mainland. It was mid-tide rising, but there were still a hundred yards or more of mud flats stretching out on either side of the road and bike path. The waters of Kechemak Bay and lofty purple white-capped mountains that contained it surrounded me. It was like walking in a dream landscape, like becoming part of nature yourself.

Along the way I passed a Russian Old Believer lady with a young girl. The lady was dressed in the soft fabric long dress and matching head scarf of her kind. She was in a pale golden yellow print, and wore several gold chains around her neck. The dress, with her olive skin, gave her an exotic air, like part of the dream. We greeted each other pleasantly, and I wished I had an excuse to talk more with her.

This dream world only lasted about three miles, then the works of man intruded. But they, too, had their fascination. A wreck of a sailing ship that looked like a Spanish galleon sits just at the edge of the high tide line. It might have been a movie prop at one time. Now there is only one mast left, and many of the windows are covered with taped-on plastic film. Someone is living in it, and runs a boat junk yard around it. There are, in addition to all kinds of dilapidated fishing boats, a fiberglass fake castle tower, brass bedsteads, a Zodiac rubber boat, and other curious objects piled wherever they were dropped. A crudely lettered cardboard sign at the drive says, “Yard Sale.”

Shortly after the galleon I passed a basin where an old barge with big patches of rust on its side was loading up. The name, Helenka B, was still legible on the bow. A car, a large piece of heavy equipment, and two tanker trucks filled the deck. It was probably bound for one of the Aleutian Islands or roadless mainland villages in the area of Homer. There are many settlements and towns in Alaska that can be reached only by sea.

I passed campgrounds, a logging chip yard, fish processors, tourist shops, art galleries, and shops offering boat tours, fish charters, and bear viewing. I gazed at them all, and wandered into some in an attempt to capture the unique culture of The Spit. Four miles down The Spit I came to the Fishing Hole. It was ringed with hopeful fishers shoulder to shoulder again, and it took me a while to pick Bob out of the crowd. This was Alaska combat fishing for real. Bob was on the far side of the hole. I walked the stony slope around to him. He had had no luck yet catching fish, and pointed out a harbor seal in the pool bobbing and swimming and doing his share of fishing. We watched the seal for a few minutes, then Bob went back to casting and I walked on.

Motorhomes, campers, and cars were parked on every inch of land that didn't have a boat or business on it. Halibut hung in rows from hooks at the little cement cleaning areas of the myriad boat charters, and salmon was piled in heaps as we had seen them yesterday. The small boat harbor was filled with fishing and touring boats. There are four ramps for boat launching, and boats slid into the water off them in regular succession. I walked on to the end of The Spit, past a huge fish-processing plant and past the ferry docks, to Land's End. There is a hotel at Land's End, the only public hostelry on The Spit.

In front of the hotel is The Spit Campground, squeezed in between the fish processing plant and the water. The Eagle Lady has lived in this derelict campground for twenty years in an old motor home. For those twenty years she has fed the eagles along the beaches in the winter. Where there used to be sixteen or twenty eagles along the beaches, there are now 160 fat and happy birds. She is a fixture, a landmark. Books have been written about her. The eagles are not protected here, nor in a refuge, so no one bothers her. There is a concern that there are getting to be too many eagles for the local environment, but the Eagle Lady is the darling of the community. She will keep on feeding her eagles.

Homer, Alaska

Some years ago Vega and Sam Pratt donated land for a museum in Homer, and the people of Homer took it from there. We spent a large part of today exploring what is now a comprehensive natural history museum. Exhibits on the native peoples, the work of the fishermen, and homesteading around Homer, are modern, well done, and engrossing. Small seating areas are mini theaters for slideshows and videos. One slide show was projected onto a sail and could be watched from either side of the sail. An older fellow in a Mackinaw jacket and mucklucks stood in the snow before a cobbled-together log and clapboard cabin in a picture on the sail. The audio said, “Sometimes I leave this place to go somewhere else. It's just a place… on the way to other places.”

There was a live cam on Gull Island, a seabird rookery, that you could pan and zoom. A case of stuffed birds next to the monitor helps in bird identification. I watched murres, gulls, and puffins doing bird things, mostly flapping and squawking. I did get a murre right up close, eye to eye. Even up close they still look like skinny penguins.

This museum, like the Ocean and Islands Center, exhibited a lot of artwork. Other than the life-sized walrus and a seal sculpture done by local women, the Oceans and Islands Center art was done in Arizona and other professional studios. All the art in the Pratt was by area artists. It was made part of the exhibits where appropriate, or decorated halls and stairwells. Again there were wonderful quilted pieces as well as paintings, pottery, and sculpture related to the land, sea, and people of Kachemak Bay. A special bonus was a notebook that exhibited photos and short essays about each artist.

It got to be well after noon, but we didn't want to take time to hunt up a restaurant for lunch, as there was to be a bear video and talk at one-thirty. Happily we each carry a diabetic sugar bar in case Bob's sugar goes down, so they were lunch. We visited a homestead historic log cabin on the property and chatted with the docent, who had been a homesteader herself in Homer fifty years ago. She was a lively old gal, and tough, I'm sure. You had to be, to survive homesteading. Near one-thirty we went back inside the museum for the bear video.

The video started late, but that was fine. It gave us time to watch bears on a live cam from McNeill River. The video, when it started, was great. It showed bears in Katmai, Kodiak, and McNeil River, all places not far from Homer. People were in the video, too. They were photographing bears from “safe platforms,” a gravel spot above the rivers where bear were catching salmon. You have to own a very good camera with zoom lenses to capture those shots. These locations can only be reached by private charter planes. The number of people allowed is severely limited, and applications are chosen by a lottery. It's an expensive hobby. We were the only two people left in the audience when the video was over, and the girl who was to give the talk had gone off somewhere. So we just got up and went off somewhere ourselves.

Behind the museum was the trailhead to an interpretive nature trail with landscape art along the path. When we found it, there was a sign posted at the trailhead, “Be Aware! There are moose and bear in this area.”
Bob stopped dead. There was no way he was going on that trail. His exact words were, “There might be some stupid-ass bear out there with cubs. I'm not going.” He's been reading too many bear-mauling stories in the Anchorage Daily News. I couldn't persuade him, so someone else will have to tell us about the Pratt Museum Interpretive Trail.

We whiled away the rest of the afternoon reading at the Homer library, browsing a book store, and Christmas shopping in a couple of gift shops. Somehow, along with the gifts we bought, there was a white box of chocolates for Ruth and Bob in the bag when we got back to the camper.

The Elks Club restaurant opened at six o'clock. We were there at five-thirty, and hungry. The second floor lounge and restaurant were in one big room divided by a half wall. Next to the bar at the far end of the room was a quilted hanging in fall colors with a moose silhouette reflected in a pond. Three or four regulars decorated the bar stools; the rest of the room was empty and quiet.

The whole front of the room was glass overlooking the bay and mountains. A slight breeze rippled the water enough to make flashing sun-sparkles dance across the bay, while the somber dusky-purple mountains watched from afar

We sank into soft chairs at a table by the window and I ordered a Manhattan. The view just called for sipping a Manhattan and reveling in scenery. Bob opted for a local beer and got us a basket of popcorn. Time flowed by. We watched a couple on the beach far below us play with their retriever in the water. Fishing boats glided past us to their berths somewhere out of our sight. At some time we had a fried halibut dinner, then prolonged the experience by splitting a slice of cheesecake and dallying with an after-dinner coffee. Life was good in Homer.

Seward, Alaska

We turned off Seward Highway onto a dusty gravel road through the woods, went over a railroad track, made three more turns, and drove into a cleared campground area closely backed by lofty, jagged, touch-the-sky mountains. The suddenness of them when you emerge from the dust and trees is like a curtain whipping open to reveal a fantastic stage set.

After setting up camp, we drove six miles into Seward to stop at the visitor center and then take a little familiarization tour of the town. We made reservations for a day-long cruise tomorrow. Then we bought a hazelnut latte from one of the ubiquitous expresso shops, and sipped and strolled along Seward's boat basin boardwalk. A drive through town confirmed that we will go back down there some time to walk the streets and pop into shops and galleries. We found the Life of the Seas building, the Kenai Fjords National Park Visitor Center and the road to Exit Glacier. We're set now to tour Seward.

Did I mention that once again, when you think you've seen it all - you haven't? The mountains surrounding Seward seem taller, closer, with a different beauty from the other Alaskan towns we've visited. Each town, each settlement, each highway has its own wonders of nature, and we go from one spectacular scene to another.

Seward, Alaska

We lined up on the dock at Seward Small Boat Harbor at nine this morning for our all-day cruise, this time on the ship Chugach to see Kenai Fjords National Park. As fast as I tried to move, a family of four beat me to the bow on the outside deck. But I took a place just beside two of them, so had a pretty good seat. I don't know if the captains/tour lecturers on all these trips are good or we've been lucky to get very personable and knowledgeable ones, but we came up with another winner.

Most of Kenai Fjords National Park is accessible only by water. There are hiking/backpacking trails, but the trailheads must also be reached by water. Ninety percent of this mountainous fjord-cut park is ice, the Harding Ice Field. Only around the coastal edges are there forested mountains and some open beaches, and even on those mountains there are many glaciers visible from the waters. True to fjord geology, most of the mountainsides plunge into the sea. Steep rocky islands and sea stacks are common. It's a frozen world of Icelandic myth, particularly today, when it was misty off in the distance and gray clouds raced across the sky. A lady seated next to me and I could almost see trolls on the ledges and Thor's fire flash on jagged mountains tops. I took photos like crazy.

Most of the morning was spent cruising on an outward trip toward Aialik Glacier. We saw several sea otters floating peacefully on their backs along the way, and a group Steller sea lions lounging on a sea stack. We passed some seabird rookeries, but not close enough to see much. However, puffins and gulls often flew by the boat or landed briefly in the water. I did see one guillemot, too, and a sooty shearwater.

Everyone had to come inside for our lunch of fried halibut, chips, and an apple. Bob found a spot right behind the captain, where he could stand and look out the captain's window, read the instruments and watch the captain. He was set for the day. We ate lunch together, then I went back out on the front outside deck. This time there was no one on the benches, and I got a seat right on the prow. I tied the hood of fat red jacket tight, (the Velcro contraption I had sewed on it worked fine,) put on my sunglasses and gloves, and was ready for the next several hours.

Dall porpoises came to see us. They raced around the prow of the boat, splashed and played, and I had a front row seat for the show. I could even see them underwater when they swam right in front of the boat, as if leading it along.

The captain kept reporting how many miles we were from the glacier, building up excitement for the big event. At twenty miles away, we got our first sight of it, a blue-white flow of ice down the mountain into the water. The boat stopped just a half mile from the glacier. The face of blue ice towered above us forever. Small pieces dropped off into the sea in front of us. There was a huge chunk almost in the middle that looked as if it really were ready to go. The captain said he was focusing his energy on it to make it calve, but it never did. Everyone was hoping. I dragged Bob out so we could take each other's picture in front of the glacier. Everybody was trying to do the same thing, photograph each other, photograph the glacier. The deck was jammed with jostling people.

When I had my pictures and had seen enough, I got off the deck to make room for others, and headed for the bathroom. There were only two bathrooms on board for 120 people, so there was always a lineup. But now everyone was looking at the glacier. I bounded down the stairs and right into the little room at the very bottom of the boat. I had hardly got settled in there when the ship started to move through the ice field. I could hear the ice sliding against the hull, and every now and then a piece hit the wall next to me with a loud thunk. Talk about scary!! I did the fastest hand wash in history, yanked open the door, and ran over one of the crew who was waiting. I wanted out of there and up where I could get a life jacket.

Gradually the deck emptied, as it was cold, cold, up by that glacier, and I got my prow seat back. We moved away down the fjord to find other sights. The captain was heading for whale-watching grounds next, he said. I had taken time to fortify myself with a cup of hot chamomile tea, and I settled in again for nature's show.

At the whale spot, all was quiet. Seabirds flitted and floated around us. Engines idled, the boat floated with them. Everyone was scanning the waters. The captain was just starting to say it looked like we might lose out, when a humpback jumped half out of the water some ways from us. People jammed the starboard rails. The whale rolled, leaped, and made spectacular breeches, all the time moving closer to us. Then on the other side of the boat, another humpback surfaced and blew. It was a circus. Tourists with huge zoom lenses were frantically running back and forth to get pictures of both whales. Did I get one? Not really. Most of the action was too far away for my camera, and at the spectacular breech the whale did closest to the boat, I didn't have my camera up to my eye. I took pictures, but they're just sea with a black spot on them, or just sea where I didn't quite catch the black spot. What we saw, though, we'll remember forever.

From the whales the captain took us right up to a spike of rock with trees on the top. Puffins galore decorated on the rocky ledges. It's the best view I'll ever have of puffins, both tufted and horned. My binoculars never left my face, though you could see the birds quite well with bare eyes. We floated there for a while, so everyone got a good look. Then the captain took the boat around the corner, and rows of common murres, the penguins of the North, sat on the guano-white ledges and gazed at me through my binoculars.

We had lingered so long at the glacier and watching whales that the captain said we had to head straight for Fox Island to keep close to schedule. There would be no more dawdling to look at seabirds or sea lions.

For the next hour and a half we cruised again through spectacular and mystic landscape. We passed rocky beaches and sea stacks bedecked with lounging sea lions. Seabirds sailed or floated alongside the boat. I left my bow seat and went back to the open deck on the stern. There the scenery perspective was completely changed, so I sat down and stayed there for the rest of the trip to Fox Island.

The boat company maintains a resort of a few log cabins and a huge log dining hall building on a beach of the island. The cove-like resort beach is tucked between two steep mountain slopes covered with forest. Cabin rental includes meals in the dining hall; and every day the Kenai Fjords tours bring in two boatloads of tourists for a salmon bake at the dining hall, one in the afternoon and one in the evening.

A large deck bejeweled with pots of flowers separated the dining hall from the cabins. It overlooked an interior lagoon, and there were a number of picnic tables on for dining outside. We chose a table inside near a window of the large dining room for our dinner. The window view was terrific, and we were nearer the buffet table. There we enjoyed our meal of salmon, salad, baked potato, pie, and corn on the cob. I left Bob heading back for seconds on the salmon and corn and went out to take a look around the area.

Rockwell Kent, the well-known illustrator, spent 1918-1919 on Fox Island as the guest of a homesteader. He drew pictures and kept a journal of the experience that is published as a book with the name Wilderness, a Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. I have the book, and knew of Fox Island from other reading. This was my chance to experience it.

But we didn't have nearly enough time. The boat whistle blew before I had a chance to walk the shingle beach or try to skip stones. I had spent too much time taking pictures.

A lot of the people napped during the last hour of the trip, sleeping off their salmon and corn on the cob. I sat out on the back deck again and drank in the scenery, while Bob chatted with the captain.

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