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Tuesday | July 12

Blashke Islands

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

-Henry David Thoreau

The expedition team is up at 0600 for scouting hikes and kayaks in a place we have not been to all season. A small-craft advisory was in effect for Chatham Strait, hence the change in the itinerary for the next three days.

I lead a walk on the north-east side of a complicated but small archipelago of islands. The far reaches of the arm where our group of adventurous hikers are dropped off is an incredibly rich area for intertidal invertebrates. The channel connects with an inner bay only at high tide.

Brightly colored leather stars cover a long and thick bed of mussels.

Dozens of tidepool sculpins are scattered about in tide pools, while a couple of Pacific Staghorn Sculpins succumbed to stressors with their last breaths in the shallow and heated tide-pools.

 

Air temperatures reached close to 80-degrees Fahrenheit, a veritable heat-wave in Alaska.

We enjoy a couple of hours of bush-whacking to a muskeg or peat bog. Plants include Shore Pine (Pinus contorta various contorta), the carnivorous round-leaf sundew, Labrador tea, sphagnum mosses, cotton grass, and dwarf hemlocks growing out of the acidic soils.

Upon our return to the inner bay of the island complex, everybody wades into the water to clean off the sweat built up from our inland foray.

In the evening everyone gets up on deck for the evening light show along the Wrangell Narrows that splits Kupreanof and Mitkof Islands. I give some interpretation of the navigational markers as we pass through this famous passage. Word is out amongst passengers and crew, that we will be passing—for the first time this summer season—our sister ship, the M/V Wilderness Adventurer.

We all get out on the decks and give a group yell as we pass each other port-to-port at about 5 nautical miles per hour.