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Writer's pictureTal Galton

Alaska (Pt 2: Water Wilderness)

I’ve never written a travelogue, nor did I plan to. But I’d never been to Alaska either. I want to share what I experienced, and share a few of the thoughts I had while spending 20 hours of light each day immersed in the forests, the tundra, the ocean, the lakes and creeks of that amazing state. I spent the entire second half of June further north than I’ve ever been, and it turns out that that much light is very stimulating. It may take a while to formulate these posts, so bear with me as the thoughts and photos trickle out. 


In the previous post, I introduced the Tidelines Institute and its Inian Islands’ Hobbit Hole. We spent the week camped just above high tide, on the border between two vast wildernesses. The more familiar one is the forest with its mosses, ferns and wildflowers. The other one is even more vast, and far more enigmatic. We spent a week perched at the end of our known world, on the edge of an alien aquatic planet. Our tent was situated amongst earthly lifeforms – chocolate lilies, seaside sedges and varied thrushes – but in front of us was a mysterious abyss full of some of the strangest creatures I’ve ever encountered

The border consists of a gradation of zones. Along the edge of the shady spruce forest is a shrubby thicket of mostly devil's club and willows. Thorny devil’s club, Orplopanax horridus, is a close cousin of the ginsengs (Panax), and it brims with important medicinal compounds. Perhaps if ginseng was as well armed as devil’s club, it would not be so rare now. As to the willows, in Coming into the Country (the ultimate Alaska travelogue), John McPhee writes that “willow vegetates the state,” citing that 33 of the 133 trees and shrubs in Alaska are species of Salix


Moving closer to the shore, the shrub zone gives way to a swath rich with herbaceous wildflowers: lupines, shooting stars, bog orchids and chocolate lilies. Closer to the water, only grasses and sedges grow. Then comes the intertidal zone, full of creatures who straddle both worlds – one salty and aquatic; the other with direct exposure to air, rain and sunlight. The sea creatures who populated our front stoop – barnacles, mussels, chiton, limpets, and hermit crabs – spend half their time on earth, and half in the waterworld. Every 12 hours, the resident raven family helped themselves, noisily, at the low-tide buffet. Land otters, denning on a nearby peninsula, quietly explored and hunted in the lagoon. 



Plume anemone, on a dock piling

A bit further in, but still visible in the shallows by the dock, were pink plumose sea anemones, an astonishing array of seastars, moon jellies, and schools of fish. The keystone species that create the architecture of the shallows are various forms of kelp. Kelp looks like a large, vascular, underwater plant, and resemble trees of an underwater forest; but kelp is actually a colony of brown algae. They are colonial protists – taxonomically and morphologically more like underwater slime molds than plants. Some species of kelp can grow 18” per day. 

Kelp thrives in the “gut” – the narrow inlet between the open waters of the Icy Strait and the Hobbit Hole’s sheltered lagoon. The gut is where the tidal current makes itself known in dramatic fashion – for brief periods during each tidal cycle, a white water current forms, as the Pacific Ocean sloshes in – and out – the lagoon. Brownish-green streamers of kelp sway towards the lagoon as the tide comes in, and swing outwards as the tide rushes out. It can be tricky for boats to navigate the tides and the kelp of the gut to get in and out of the Hobbit Hole. Raking the kelp out of the gut from a rowboat is a regular chore. Some kelp gets pickled in the kitchen and served with sandwiches. The best methods for using the massive haul-outs of kelp in the garden is debated – compost it? or simply mulch it directly onto the beds? Much of the kelp simply gets dragged ashore, because (18 inches a day!) there is more than can be dealt with at any one time.      


Next installment: the effect 25% more daylight has on a person and an ecosystem.



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