Kenai Fijords

Day 3 of Alaskan Adventures with Joey

We got up early to drive down to Seward for our 11:30 Kenai Fijords boat tour.  The drive was pretty but we both slept through parts of it. We got into Seward a little over an hour before our tour. The tour was 6 hours long, give or take a half hour. Rather than bore you with all of the details, I'll just give the story of it through pictures. Needless to say, some new species for me!

Alaska sure is pretty.

Leaving the dock and monster cruise ship.

OTTERS!

ORCA!

This is one of the members of the AK6 pod. At least that is what I remember our captain saying. There was a research vessel that was following them around.

Horned Puffin

Common Murres 

Steller Sea Lions

A bunch of seabirds nest on the little islands. The tour boat went around some of those, specifically the Chat, Matushka and Chiswell Islands. Here we saw many Common Murres. The captain called them "flying potatoes" because they are fairly clumsy or inept fliers. They are not able to change direction that easily and hence come at you like a flying potato. I thought it was a pretty funny description of them. They are much more capable swimmers and divers, sort of like the penguins of the north, but with the ability to fly even if not that well. The Horned and Tufted Puffins were around these islands too. I've seen Tufted in Oregon, but there are no Horned there so it was a treat to see them as well.

Just some gulls. Galucous-winged Gulls that is. 

Not the best picture of a colony of Black-legged Kittiwakes.

It's as if I am looking up a giant's nose.

We looked at some more islands with breeding colonies of birds, more specifically one with a TON of Black-legged Kittiwakes. The picture above does not do it justice. The video below does. It was a very surreal experience, maybe even something akin to "The Birds." Not completely, since they were not trying to kill everyone on the boat, but they were going a bit crazy since there was a juvenile Bald Eagle trying to pick some of them off.

We finally reached the Aialik Glacier after some time on the boat. All of the glaciers in Kenai Fijords National Park are part of the Harding Ice Field which covers over half of the 669,983-acre park. The ice is several thousand feet thick. A look into the last ice age, these giant moving ice floes carve the valleys and fijords as they recede. It is strange imagining what this glacier looked like just a decade ago and how much farther it stretched before reaching the salty waters of the Gulf of Alaska.

I tried to get all of these in a line but it didn't quite work out, but you get the idea. Look at the tiny boat next to the giant glacier!

We spent a good 30-45 minutes watching the ice move. We had some pretty spectacular calving events (when large pieces of ice break from the glacier and fall into the water) as you can see in some of my pictures.

Our stoic captain and Aialik.

Harbor seal on ice in front of the glacier.

Glacier calving

Unfortunately, we didn't get to spend a lot of time in the Seward area, but would like to see more of it someday. Especially because we missed checking out the Alaska SeaLife Center, which I was super excited about. Aside from all of the other excuses (Denali) to come back to Alaska, that one is on the top of my list!

Black-legged Kittiwake

As we drove to Homer, the sky was darkened by smoke clouds from the forest fires. It gave a false sense of twilight or sunset, and was quite beautiful. Most wildfires in Alaska are allowed to burn, since it is a natural part of the ecosystem. However, if they threaten people's lives and homes, they will fight them.

With the end of this post, I must say that it took me a very long time to get this one together. I again apologize for that, but I do have a limited amount of free time at the moment, and a slow internet connection. But I appreciate all of you regularly checking it and promise that I will get more out as soon as I can!