1925 - Part 2 - Among the Glaciers of Alaska With an Evinrude Kicker

This installment in the June 1925 Motor Boating is filled with photos compared to the last issue!   I have  to admit, there really wasn't much mentioned of the Evinrude.  But, as you read,  just remembering that it is their motor makes you respect the older outboards! 

Only boats of very shallow draft can get up Taku River to Twin Glacier Camp.  There is plenty of water in the river for boats drawing five or six feet of water, but they cannot get over the bar that the river has deposited near its mouth in Taku Inlet.  

Even with the little Ikigihk, which can run almost anywhere that's a little damp, we were churning mud and sand for several miles before we finally got over the hump and into the river channel beyond.  Then we had to fight a strong current and dodge a miscellaneous assortment of icebergs before we accomplished the several miles up the Taku River to the landing at Twin Glacier Camp.  

Even with the long hours of summer in Alaska, the day was about gone when we arrived.  Our hostess, of course, had no knowledge of our coming, there being no telegraph or telephone communication between there and Juneau.  A pack of howling malamutes greeted us at the boat landing.  We were delighted, however, to find Mrs. Gray, a buxom lass with a perpetual smile, and a dialect that was as difficult to understand as it is to read Bobby Burns.  She welcomed us into the great log house , which is the main chamber of the hunting lodge, and in about twenty minutes we were thoroughly warmed before a great log fire in a huge fireplace.  Then the dinner gong was sounded, and we sat down to a meal of planked moose steaks, with all the trimming from soup to nuts. 

That meal is another memory.  The moose meat had been furnished by Dr. W. D. Sinclair, surgeon of the Chichigoff Mines, who'd come over from Chichigoff Island  with a fifteen-foot boat and an outboard motor, for a week of moose hunting along the Taku River.  He'd brought in 1,200 pounds of moose meat that morning.  The remaining guests of the camp were two reputed millionaires from Tennessee.  They claimed to be hunters, but in a month's stay around the camp they had killed nothing but about six cases of bourbon and gin that they'd brought down out of Canada - making the journey by canoe down the Taku River from Atlin Lake.  

The Colonel, who seemed to be the big money bag of this precious pair, wasn't a half bad sort of fellow. He broke out a square-face of bonded bourbon, and after sampling it, we were ready to concede that these mighty hunters were probably enjoying life in their own way.  The Taku River country is perhaps about as nearly the sportsman's idea of paradise as can be fond on this earth.  It is an uninhabited wilderness of towering snow-clad mountain peaks, virgin forests, boundless muskegs (marshes), and jungles of underbrush such as one expects to find in the tropics.  Within a two-hour traveling radius of the camp, chiefly by motor boat, one may find every kind of game commonly known in Alaska - moose, black and brown bears, uncountable deer, caribou, bighorn sheep, white mountain goats, and feathered game galore.  

Moose hunting had been one of Wiedley's ambitions from boyhood, so on our second day at Twin Glacier Camp, he took Ikigihk, Tommy Shorty, one of Dr. DeVighne's Indian guides, and one of my high powered rifles, and set out up the river.  In four hours he was back in camp with a fine head, and half a ton of moose meat.  I went fishing that day - took Dr. DeVighne's motor boat The Mud Hen, and went down the river into Turner Lake, a fresh water glacier pool that looks like Yosemite Valley with the floor covered with water.

The first toss of the fly into the lake, and it was swallowed - seemingly by a bucking horse.  Half an hour later, after an indescribably thrilling struggle, I landed a rainbow trout 27 inches long.  I caught three more more fish of similar size before noon, and then quit fishing because I couldn't imagine any possible use for more than 25 pounds of fish a day.

The same day Mrs. Gray went moose hunting in the muskeg over across the river.  She came back late that evening, scratched, bruised, mosquito bitten, and her clothing in tatters.  She told a lurid tale about trying to stalk a moose, and stumbling smack dab upon a huge brown bear.  There is no denying that these bears are perhaps the largest and most ferocious animals on earth, and according to Mrs. Gray's story, the bear promptly wheeled around and chased her up the tallest spruce tree she could find in the muskeg.  The Colonel looked across the table and winked.  Nobody else winked, but the looks of all present signified that the story was accepted with a grain of salt.  

The following day, however, I went moose hunting in the same area with Taku Jim, one of the Indian guides.  Far out in the muskeg we found a  huge spruce tree with monstrous bear tracks in the mud all around it.  Jim suggested we had better climb the tree and comb the muskeg with our field glasses.  

Thereupon I began going up the tree.  About twenty feet from the ground, I observed several branches from which the bark had been peeled as if by someone climbing with hob-nailed boots.  I climbed perpendicular for about 120 feet, and found the same marks all the way up.  It was impossible to climb higher.  

I was reaching for my field glasses when I found a bright scrap of scarlet woolen yarn sticking on a mass of resin that oozed from the tree trunk.  It was a fragment of the red sweater Mrs. Gray was wearing at the time of her reported encounter with the bear. 

Jim and I killed no game that day, but at the dinner table in camp that evening I told the story of the spruce tree in the muskeg, with the bear tracks all around it.  I told about the marks on the branches, and then as a final summing up before the jury, produced the piece of scarlet yarn found in the tree top.  Mrs. Gray's story was verified beyond a reasonable doubt.  As a reward I got a third piece of apple pie.

I learned later that brown bears have no friends among the Alaskans.  Dr. Sinclair told of at least a dozen men he had known who had been devoured by them, and of a score of others he had tailored and repaired after the bears had left them for dead - surgery he had performed while on duty at the Chichigoff Mines.  Moreover, at Twin Glacier Camp, men are not permitted to venture off the premises without being heavily armed, and women and children never leave the camp without being accompanied by an armed male escort.  These Alaskan bears seem to be incredibly numerous.  They attain enormous size - often sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred pounds.  They are reputed to be the only animals on the American continent that will attack a human being without the slightest provocation.

After several wonderful days in the Taku River Country, an opportunity presented itself for me to return to Juneau aboard a fast motor boat.  I had no purpose in making the trip virtually back to our starting point, except I was anxious to se the result obtained in the numerous photographic negatives I'd exposed.  There, a resident photographer graciously extended to me the courtesies of his laboratory.  I had photographs of glaciers, icebergs and what not.  Everything came through the hypo about one hundred percent of anticipations.  When the local photographer saw my negatives, he picked out about two dozen of them and asked if I cared to sell them.  I had no desire to sell them, and told him so, but he insisted.   Finally he said: "If you will just sell me those negatives - name your price, and I'll pay cash." 

Just why a professional photographer, living within a few miles of scenes that he could very easily go out and photograph himself, should want to purchase a set of negatives made by one who is an amateur to those local conditions, seemed a puzzle. I asked the man to explain.  This he did, saying," You made a number of these pictures from floating ice, didn't you?". "Yes", I replied. "Well, don't you ever do that again.  I can't make negatives like that.  Furthermore, there isn't a photographer in all of Alaska who will go aboard an iceberg to photograph anything.  It's taking your life in your hands - and with buttered fingers at that.  Any iceberg is liable to flop bottom side up at any minute without the slightest warning.  If they don't turn over they may crumble up under our feet.  In either event you're a GONER!".

He explained further that the icebergs being fresh water ice falling into salt water, begin to thaw as soon as they fall from the glaciers.  The thawing occurs from underneath, so every berg eventually gets top heavy and rolls over.  I thanked the man for his kindly advice, and compensated him for the use of his laboratory by presenting him with a number of negatives which were practically duplicates of the others.  I got back to Taku Inlet that night aboard the United States Naval Minesweeper Swallow, which was going down there to calibrate a radio compass station.

From the Twin Glacier Camp, Wiedley and I had one more ambition to realize before we shoved off for the south again.  We wanted to take Igigihk into Twin Glacier Lake, a glacial pool up the Taku, where no motor boat had ever been before.  This lake is a huge glacial scar on the landscape fed by two enormous live glaciers, which are characteristically named -  Twin Glaciers.  The lake discharges into the Taku River through the Twin Glaciers River.  The latter stream is short and swift.  It drops to lower elevations very abruptly, and in mid-summer carries almost as much ice as it does water.

We left the camp at daylight - 3 o'clock in the morning, and shoved off up the Taku, with the little motor forcing the boat up against the swift current at just about one mile per hour.  We were constantly zig-zagging back and forth to avoid oncoming cakes of ice, or treacherous whirlpools; but eventually we managed to cover the few miles of distance that lay up the Taku between the camp and mouth of Twin Glacier River.  

We swung into Twin Glacier River.  We didn't go a hundred yards before we came to a rapid where the force of the current completely neutralized the power of our motor.  Great icebergs were constantly thundering down these rapids in an endless procession.  Any one of these bergs crowding Igigihk against another, or against the shore, would have crushed her like a grain of wheat between millstones.  There was no means of avoiding disaster except by artful dodging.  Nevertheless, with the aid of two Indian guides, motor, ropes, and poles, we conquered the rapids and putt-putted out among the ice floes of Twin Glacier lake about noon.

 
We spent most of the afternoon exploring the ice floes, studying the myriads of waterfowl that rode on every iceberg, taking photographs, climbing over the glaciers, and listening to the constant groaning, crashing , and creaking and grinding of literally tens of millions of tons of moving ice.  

Returning to the river, the descent of the rapids into the Taku, where it had taken three hours to get up, was made in scarcely more than that number of minutes.  Tense, and almost breathless minutes those were, however - for, we shot down the stream at express train speed - half expecting every instant to feel the bottom of the boat leave us as we struck some hidden rock, or to feel the tiny craft crumpled like an eggshell if we got caught between the ice masses with which we were racing.  Tame and roomy indeed seemed the Taku when we started down it toward our camp after that dash through the rapids!

Along this salt water river it was not easy to find a campsite as the light waned.

Two weeks later, after various and sundry experiences with everything from Woolly Winds to wetting waves, and from tides to ptarmigan, we were still in Alaskan waters, but had moved down the map about three hundred miles.  Scenery, icebergs, and glaciers had become almost a drug on the market.  We'd eaten salmon until we felt we never wanted to look at another pink fish - not even in a can!  Sorely in need of some fresh meat, we took our rifles, and started out to find it.  

Some Indians with whom I talked the evening before near the mouth of the great river where we'd made camp had told us: "Cross river. Plenty moose.  Plenty beeg grizzle bear too.  Climb tree.  Moose come. Bang!".  The old chief who did the talking spoke picturesque English, but his meaning was certainly clear.  So, very early that morning we took Ikigihk across the river, and into a smaller stream that drained out of an enormous muskeg.  We ascended the stream for several miles.  There was only about two feet of water under our keel.  

Presently the stream began to grow so shallow we could barely navigate.  Then we came to a beaver dam, and lifted the boat over it.  Above the dam there was plenty of water - thanks to the beavers.  Several beaver dams made the stream navigable for us right into the heart of the muskeg, or some six miles back from the salt water.  Eventually, however, we came to the head of the navigation, and made fast to a huge spruce tree - the only tree in the muskeg.  Climbing the tree for eighty feet, we scanned the muskeg with our field glasses.  For half an hour we pawed mosquitoes and moose flies, and looked for game.  A few minutes later we saw five moose - three of them bulls with legal hatracks.  They sauntered out of the muskeg into a thicket of bush about a mile away.  We promptly shinned down out of the tree.

Now , making a sneak through the marsh for a mile after game one is badly in need of for food sounds simple and easy.  But, in Alaskan muskeg - well, it's a man's job!  Picture yourself, if you can, sloshing along in a pair of clumsy hip boots in slimy mud and water up to your knees, and in coarse grass higher than your head. The grassis like so much rope.  It is matted and tangled and full of heavy brush that's too high to climb over, too rough to be broken, and too noisy to be tampered with.  Rain is coming down in torrents.  There's a cloud of mosquitoes trailing you, and kept from carrying you off in pieces only by the kerosene coating over all exposed skin.  You paw mosquitoes and swat moose flies, and unless you are a person of greater forbearance than Job himself, you'll develop a lurid vocabulary.

You fall down every hundred yards, and come up with twenty pounds of water in each boot.  By this time you are wet from head to foot, and have ceased to care how often you fall down.
You learn to sit down in the water and empty your boots by putting your feet in the air.  Then about every two hundred yards you come to a long lagoon.  There's no going around.  It's too deep for your boots and too wide to jump.  So, you splash right in, and your teeth rattle as you go down until the water touches your chin.  You struggle into the grass again, drain your boots out, and push on.  That's moose hunting!  I'm convinced the sport's been over-advertised.

We finally worked our way up to within a hundred yards of the point where we'd seen the moose enter the thicket.  There we came to a lagoon, and in prospecting its depth, I bogged down until my hat went adrift - rifle and field glasses held high overhead as I went out of sight.  Just as I came up for air Wiedley's rifle roared out three times in quick succession.  I crawled out of the water with the exclamation: "What are you shooting at?"  "A moose." he replied.  "He's down over there."
We spent the rest of the day quartering the huge animal, and portaging the meat through the muskeg to our boat.  Moosemeat was the mainstay of our diet for the next two weeks.  The value of this food soon showed in our physical condition.  We began to gain in weight and strength, and our energy for hard labor showed an appreciable impetus.

If tides are an important factor in the navigation of ships through the salt water rivier, they are of far greater importance to the navigator of a low powered craft such as ours over the same route.  A little experience soon proved to us that we could take our little boat from Alaska to Seattle virtually without power, or that we could detonate a day's supply of gasoline with Igigihk moving backwards like a crayfish.   

The sad error of underestimating the force of an opposing tide was illustrated to us one day after we passed out of Alaskan waters, and got down the coast of British Columbia into Canada.  Passing through a wide strait which we assumed to be almost tide free, we rounded a rocky point, and encountered a fog as thick as the  proverbial bowl of pea soup.  Our charts showed 50 miles of clear sailing dead ahead, so we took our course from the charts and the compass, and forged ahead with the motor churning full throttle.  For six hours we kept going, which at our normal cruising speed should have moved us about fifty miles down the map.  Along toward mid-afternoon the fog lifted, and to our dismay, there we were churning the water absolutely abeam of of the identical point where we'd encountered the fog.  We'd shot five gallons of gasoline and half a day getting nowhere.  A few minutes later the tide turned, and we began going with it at a prodigious rate of speed.  By watching the charts, and logging various points on the shore as we came abeam of them, we found ourselves flying down the salt water river at a speed of approximately 22 knots.  About 8 knots of this was boat speed.  The rest was tide.

Actually, it is "Sidney", British Columbia 

Late that afternoon we sighted an Indian in a motor boat fishing for halibut.  The boat was about half a mile off our starboard bow when we sighted it, and about that moment the Indian hooked a huge fish.  We could see him struggling with the monster, very distinctly through our field glasses.  We altered our course, thinking to get a better view, and possibly a photograph.  To our dismay, however, we soon discovered that the Indian's boat was at anchor in an 18 knot tidal current.  In spite of our best efforts Ikigihk went astern of the Indian's craft by just about half a mile, our best motor speed being useless for trying to get closer.  Sweeping on down the strait we could see the Indian still struggling with the fish.  We went out of sight behind a distant low-lying island without our being able to see whether he ever got the fish aboard or not.

Due to the lateness of the season, and the amount of time we'd spent in Alaska, we encountered much unfavorable weather.  For a week we sailed, or putt-putted in downpours of rain.  We hunted and fished in the rain, camped in the rain, and literally lived in the rain, until we almost forgot what it felt like to be dry.  When the sun did shine it was usually accompanied by high winds that took Igigihk southward under reefed sail like a migrating gossamer.  (a migrating what?)  If the rain stopped, and the wind blew, we were wet just the same - the only difference being that we were wet with salt spray instead of the rain.

For the sake of greater safety, and to help us keep our bearings through the seemingly interminable labyrinth of lace pattern waterways, we followed the commercial steamship lanes much of the time.  But, when our charts showed we could save  many miles of travel by taking short cuts back of islands, or through channels where only small boats could pass, we usually took the short cuts.  In exploring some of these diminutive passages, however, where we found our charts none to accurate, we got lost so often that we lost so often that we lost all track of the number of times.  Sometimes we'd be lost for a day or two, but we almost managed to turn up in the steamer lanes again - and invariably with a saving of many miles.  There was a great thrill to getting lost occasionally, and picking our way through titanic water-canyons - many of them utterly unexplored, and off the beaten trail where travelers never get.  

Ivory Island Lighthouse at the northwest entrance to Seaforth Channel

One experience in Seaforth Channel was typical of many others.  We had been lost for about three days, and on the third day,  without knowing exactly where we were on the map, we had jogged along for about 60 miles through a very narrow water-canyon  where the walls of perpendicular rock rose to ice-capped heights some eight to ten thousand feet almost over our gunwales.  A strong tide with which we'd been moving gave assurance we'd eventually pop out into the open waters again  And, we did.

The narrow channel suddenly terminated into a monstrous bowl-like lake of salt water.  Seventeen different water-canyons opened out of this lake like the spokes of a wagon wheel away from the hub.  We wee racking our brains over the charts, trying to figure out which of the water trails we should take, when a steamer came bounding out of one of the holes on the north side of the lake.  It was one of the Canadian Pacific passenger boats, and was going south.  The steamer ate up the distance across the lake like a buzz-saw eats through a board.  We shut down our motor, hove to, and watched the steamer.  It got to the other side of the lake, and dived into one of the water-canyons, and out of sight, like a rat going home.  We followed the ship and soon had our position verified on the charts.

Twenty days after we'd passed out of Alaskan waters we sped down the east coast of Vancouver Island on a mill race tide, rounded Fear Island Light House, and slipped into Victoria, provincial capital of British Columbia.  We spent a week ashore there in this picturesque city, which is a bit of England set down in the new world.  We had many friends there, and a glorious time.  The Canadian Government liquor stores supplied the drinks - and it didn't taste like horse liniment or varnish remover either!!  (Prohibition was still on in the US!)  It was a wicked temptation to try to smuggle a few bottles of this stuff with the Canadian seals all over the corks, across the sounds into Seattle; but out of respect for American law we sailed from Victoria with Igigihk as alcoholically dry as old man Volstead himself.

Can you read the little note in the bottom corner? :-)

We took nothing aboard but 20 gallons of gasoline, a few groceries, and shoved off into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  The strait was lashed to a foam by an inshore breeze that was sweeping in against an outflowing tide.  Bobbing around like a cork, and getting thoroughly soaked (with salt water) we finally hove into the lee of the San Juan Islands, and camped  on American soil for the first time in two months.

1929

The following day we sailed down the Washington shore to Seattle, and tied up at Colman Dock.  It was within twenty minutes of time for the Federal customs House to close for the day.  We hailed a taxi, and hurried thither to report our yacht in.  When the necessary papers had been signed, e clerk said: "I'll phone Mr. Burton, one of the inspectors on the dock, and tell him you're on your way.  If you hurry, you'll be able to get your boat cleared yet today."

Returning to the dock, the tide had reached low level, and Igigihk was riding about 25 feet below the deck of the wharf against a spider-legged assortment of tarry, oil-soaked pilings.

 "Where's the yacht?" he exclaimed. "Where'd you come from in that peanutty little sea louse?" 
 "From Skayway, Alaska", we responded "and in from Canadian waters today."

This officer was diplomatic.  He didn't come right out and ask me what relation I might be to Ananias - but, the look I got! Oh! That look!  

The inspector then crept to the edge of the wharf, and took a squint down the greasy piliing which seemed to be the only route for making a closer inspection of the Igigihk and our cargo.  
"What have you got in those bundles?" he asked. 
"Just camping out", we replied.  
"No booze, no drugs, no Chinamen?" queried the official.  "Well, run along then."  That doesn't look like a smuggler's outfit to me!"

The End

1925 - Part 1 - Among the Glaciers of Alaska With an Evinrude Kicker

This summer is just too humid here in Connecticut.  I think going along on a voyage through Alaska's glacial waterways sounds just the thing!  

Rivers are not ordinarily salty, with the exception of a few streams that rise in snow-clad mountains to dwindle away into blistering deserts, it is doubtful if such a thing as a salt water river really exists on the surface of our planet.  Yet, within the geographical boundaries of the American Continent,  and largely within the jurisdiction of the United States, there is a stretch of waterway which to the motorboatman, yachtsman, and lover of indescribably beautiful scenery and geographical phenomenon is nothing more nor less than a salt water river a thousand miles in length. Moreover, this extraordinary sheet of water has approximately 350,000 miles of shore line, and in places is as much as 350 fathoms deep.

That a river a thousand miles in length can have a shore line  equivalent to the distance fourteen times around the earth at the equator, makes it obvious that  this unusual salt water river has shores that are very irregular.  Its surface is studded with innumerable islands - islands ranging from mere snags of rock to small continents; some of them larger than many of the independent nations of the world.  There are bays and inlets along this stream as uncountable as the starts of the Milky Way.  These range from tiny coves to great sounds large enough and deep enough to provide safe and roomy anchorage for assembling in a single group all the combined merchant ships and naval vessels of the seven seas.

This tremendous salt water river with its innumerable bays, inlets, coves and sounds - its almost interminable shore line of virgin forests, rugged snow-clad mountains, titanic glaciers, and sparse human population - is known, for lack of a better name, as The Inside Passages.  A fractional portion of its shore and water area has been viewed by tens of thousands of exclamatory first-time tourists, most of whom have enthused over or been utterly bewildered by the grandeur of the ever-changing panorama before them as they stood upon the decks of steamships plying between Seattle, Washington, and Skagway, Alaska.

A mere handful of motorboatmen and yachtsmen  have learned that here is one of the most magnificent summer playgrounds on the face of the earth.  In generations to come millions will learn of this marvelous region, which is today known to comparatively few.  Perhaps at some future date some clever wit will devise a name more colorful than the sorrowful achromatic duo of almost meaningless words, Inside Passages, now used to designate a terrestrial wonderland upon which volumes might be written without even beginning to tell the story.

It was in July last year that Lionel W. Wiedey and the writer dropped off a Southern Pacific train at Portland, Oregon, to supervise the final details of certain alterations and shipment to Seattle of a sixteen foot boat with which we proposed to carry out our own personally and privately conducted cruise through the world's greatest salt water river.

(FYI:  Dr. Lionel W. Wiedey who was about 20 years old at this time became, in later years, the Chief Geologist for the International Petroleum Co., Ltd.)

Everybody who derived a fragmentary inkling of our plans knew we were insane.  Our boat was a mere sixteen-foot Evinrude skiff - the little round bottomed spruce boat built over and oak frame, and catalogued by the Evinrude Motor Company, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for use on quiet inland lakes and rivers.     For purposes of locomotion it had a 2 h.p. single cylinder Evinrude outboard motor and a pair of oars.  This boat was purchased out of stock at the Milwaukee firm's  Portland branch.  The only alteration made was to fit it out with a centerboard and an 18 foot mast carrying 250 square feet of cat-rigged sail.  This diminutive craft had neither air chambers nor the self bailing feature with which sea going life boats are conventionally equipped.  Likewise it had no cabin and no provision for sleeping or cooking on board.  

(For a brief step sideways to read a bit more about the Evinrude boats, go to this Antique & Classic Boat Society page.)

Sometimes when we made camps at high tide, our boat would be beached high and dry a mile or more from the water when the tide receded.  If a landing was made on a gradually sloping shore the boat could not be launched again until the next high tide.

To anyone with the slightest knowledge of boats it was evident this 300-pound cockleshell couldn't weather much of a sea without being pounded under.  One old Columbia River rat among those already convinced we were crazy, declared a heavy fog condensing upon the walls of our centerboard well would fill our boat and founder us - therefore, "How in the name of Jehosaphat we expected to cruise from Alaska back to the United States" was "too fur up the gulch" for him.

Further conversation with these boatmen, however, elicited information that not one of them had any conception of the route we intended to cruise.  They visualized our tiny boat being buffeted about like a match stem upon the hissing waves of the open Pacific.  We, on the other hand, had spent months studying detailed navigation charts and maps - soliciting information from the Canadian and American Government sources, salmon fishermen, sourdough Alaskans, and about everyone else from whom a shred of reliable information might be gained.

We had laid out our course through the Inland Passages.  We had the tide tables almost committed to memory, and had scheduled our course to move WITH the tides as much as possible, to camp each night, and eat our meals on shore - and never be beyond paddling distance from dry land with the aid of a life preserver, if we should be so unfortunate as to meet with mishap.

We knew every point along the thousand mile route where we could buy groceries, and had arranged for supplies of gasoline to be awaiting us along the shores over the larger portions of the trip where distance and limited carrying capacity of our craft would not permit transporting the required amount of fuel.

In due time we arrived in Seattle, called at the freight house for our boat and equipment, and trucked the whole outfit to Colman Dock, where it was put aboard United States Eagle Boat No. 57.

The U.S. Navy Eagle-class patrol craft PE-57.
It was commissioned on 15 October 1919 and finally sold on 5 March 1947.

Squeaking against the dock, and tugging at her moorings on a rising tide, the naval craft was getting up stream preparatory to shoving off on a fifteen-day reservist cruise to Alaska.  Wiedey and I went aboard, and were assigned to the officer's quarters - not as reservists, or members of navy personnel, but as guests of the Secretary of the Navy.

There were several reasons why we has decided to undertake this cruise from Alaska to the United States rather than from the United States to Alaska.  The primary consideration was the fact that by going over the route with a larger vessel than our own, we would gain much information regarding saltwater river navigation - information of the kind that is not to be obtained any other way.  We were getting away to a rather late start for the brief summer of those northern latitudes.  Thus by making the trip from the north we were literally migrating southward ahead of the encroachment of winter, instead of running north to run into it.

Consideration was also given to the fact the prevailing wind direction of this region at this season of the year is south to southeast.  So, by routing our trip southwards we were taking what advantage we could of the prevailing winds rather then having them to contend with.  We later discovered that in making the trip with so small a boat these carefully thought-out advance arrangements were material aids in the success of the venture - a venture that became AD-venture many times before we saw Seattle again.

Eight days after the Eagle Boat left Seattle, we were landed bag and baggage at Juneau, the territorial capital of Alaska.  There we soon began to discover many things.  Today there are two outstanding characteristics of Alaska among my memories of Alaska and Alaskans.  The first is the wonderful hospitality of the people towards strangers in their land, and the second is the long summer days - days of 18 to 22 hours of daylight with scarcely any night at all.

 The development of Alaska seems to be mostly in the hands of people of Scandinavian and Scotch origin.  In this vast country - the last real frontier of our country - these people seem to have found an environment approximating that of their native lands, but with the opportunities of the new and out of the way places.  Family names such as Olsen, Larson, Jensen, Bomark, Anderson, Otterson, McKinnon, McDougal, Booth, McLachen, Dundas and Burns predominate and indicate the origins of nationality. 

We spent a week in and around Juneau, and during that time got acquainted with a major portion of the population of this thriving Alaskan metropolis of 3.000 inhabitants - everybody from Hon. Scott C. Bone, Governor of the territory, down to humble old wharf-rats who had lost miscellaneous fingers, toes, and ears, in the frigid winter climate of the back country.

NOTE: This great photo of Juneau in 1926 is from the Library of Congress.  It is actually from a stereopticon card.

To the last man, Alaskans seemed to be genuinely interested in us and our affairs, and all ready to lend a hand to help us at anything from a heave on the line, to volunteering useful information, or inviting us in to have dinner.  The writer has traveled on five of the continents of this earth, but nowhere else have I found such genuine whole-hearted hospitality as one finds in Alaska.  It is undoubtably the rigors of the country and its sparse population that creates this condition.  People are simply compelled to be friendly with each other in a country where there are only about twenty-five thousand of them scattered over an area equivalent to one-third of the continental United States, and in some parts of which winter temperatures go to 60 to 70 degrees below zero with almost perpetual darkness.

Juneau waterfront in 1920s

A discovery about southeastern Alaska that the visiting yachtsman is sure to make very quickly is that the region has some enormous tides.  Juneau is situated at the foot of a precipitous and perpetually snow clad mountains and upon a great inlet of the so-called Inland Passages known as Gastineau Channel.  In front of Juneau the channel is about a mile and a half wide.  Opposite is a little island - Douglas Island - about as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.  Any ship ever built, or likely to be built, can dock at Juneau, but a few miles up the channel toward Skagway, the waterway ceases to be navigable except for very small boats at high tide.  The tides raise and lower the water level by about forty feet, so, at high tide a small craft may go up the channel and through the shallows known as Canoe Passage into the Lynn Canal.  Large boats must go around Douglas Island, for Canoe Passage is high and dry at low tide.  

Once into the Lynn Canal there is about 300 fathoms of water up this ten mile wide canal for a hundred miles to Skagway.  Just why this waterway, ten miles wide, a hundred miles ling, 300 fathoms deep, and bounded by mountain walls towering to snow-clad elevations of 14,000 and 15,000 feet, should be called a CANAL is a mystery.  But Alaska is a land of enormities.  Mountains up to 12,00 feet are only FOOTHILLS, streams the size of the Mississippi at Minneapolis are CREEKS, and the great fjord in front of Skagway is a CANAL.   The only thing I found in Alaska that is really credited with having size is the Alaskan mosquito.  Even Alaskans admit they've got 'em, and they are the next thing to twist-drill hummingbirds with saxophone songs.  Moreover, the Milky Way is only a bit of space compared with their numbers - these winged musicians that bite through your boot soles and carry one away in fragments!

We got acquainted with the tides of Gastineau Channel when we attempted to launch our boat at Juneau.  The little craft had been brought up from Seattle on the deck of the navy Eagle Boat.  The Eagle Boat docked at ten o'clock at night but it was still broad daylight, the sun being scarcely out of sight behind the lofty elevations of Douglas Island.  Our diminutive craft was hoisted over the side, and set on the dock.  Wiedley and I went to the Juneau Hotel, engaged a suite of rooms, and went to bed.  Both of us were soon asleep.  

It seemed that I had been asleep for several hours when I became awakened for some unknown reason.  I opened my eyes and looked around.  It was daylight - about as light as it is in New York City about 7 o'clock on a mid-summer evening.  I reached for my watch. It was 11:30.  
I rolled over and went to sleep again.  It seemed I had been asleep for hours and hours when I woke up for the second time.  Daylight with a harsh Arctic sun was pouring in the open windows.  It must be nearly noon, I thought.  Yet, there was not a sound from the streets below.  Alaskans must be in the habit of sleeping very late.  I looked at my watch again.  It was 4 A.M.  

Trying to sleep through one of Alaska's daylight nights reminded me of the slumbers I used to try to get when my nights were turned into days as a police reporter on the Los Angeles Express.  Alaskans live according to the clock, not by the hours of daylight and darkness.  

At seven o'clock in the morning, with the sun almost where we would expect it at noon, we breakfasted, and went to the dock with the idea of launching our boat at high tide.  The tide was up within six to eight feet of the dock floor.  There was a big hand derrick on the dock which the wharfinger  had given us permission to use - so, launching the boat would be an easy task - we thought.  But, such jobs never seem to go according to schedule.  

We fiddled around for some time rigging a rope sling on the boat, hooked the derrick block onto the sling, and hoisted the craft clear of the wharf deck.  We swung the derrick boom around, and got the boat out over where we thought the Gastineau Channel was going to be.  But, the water wasn't exactly where we expected to find it.  The receding tide had lowered the water surface by about 38 feet.  We began lowering the boat, contemplating we would be able to slide down the rope and go aboard.  Once more we learned something about Alaskan tides.  Our tackle lacked about four feet of being long enough to set the boat down on the surface of low tide.  We didn't feel equal to the task of trying to hoist the boat back up onto the dock again with the hand windlass, so we left in hanging there in mid air until the tide came back to catch up with the craft from below.

Once we got our boat in the water we possessed ourselves of the conventional mode of individual transportation which is to the southeastern Alaskan about what a flivver is to the Kansas farmer.  With a boat in Alaska one is privileged to go just about anywhere that human beings have any occasion or desire to go.  

Without a boat one has just about the same degree of locomotion as a Chesapeake Bay oyster before it reaches the half shell size.  Where should we cruise?  That was the next question to be decided.

We wanted to see Skagway, 100  miles away, that historical old seaport that was the outfitting point for innumerable joys and heartaches in the days of Soapy Smith and the Klondike gold stampede.  So we bought a few groceries and shoved off up the Gastineau Channel on the high tide the day after we got our boat in the water.  

Of course, we had to have a name for our craft.  We christened her Ikigihk, Atlin Indian for Good Fishing, and cleared from Juneau with the Alaskan Capital as her port of registry.  We putt-putt-putted up Gastineau Channel, slipped through Canoe Passage on the hump of high water slack, and coasted down the hill into Lynn Canal when the tide began to fall. 



 Lynn Canal resembles nothing so much as it does Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.  I've boated on Lake Lucerne and Lynn Canal is just a second Lake Lucerne done on a little bigger scale, and with salt water substituted for the melted snows that flow down the River Rhine.  But, Lynn Canal is moody.  It may be like a mirror of plate glass in the morning, and a seething, hissing, teakettle of commotion in the afternoon.  It can kick up a sea in which no small boat can live when it is swept by a Taku, or Woolly Wind, those peculiar windstorms that occasionally lash down between its three mile high canyon walls form the tops of the Chilcoots.

We were fortunate, however, in catching favorable weather for our jaunt up the Lynn Canal.  It's surface was like a mill pond, and we covered the 100 miles in two days.  The trip could have been made in less time but we had no desire to hasten through such magnificent scenery, and though boating conditions so lovely as to fall a man's lot only about once in a lifetime.

Years ago Skagway was a city.  It was the largest, fastest growing, and most thriving community in Alaska.  It boasted a population of 10,000 but like many a good town, whose commercial life is founded on a single industry, it began growing in reverse gear when the Yukon gold bug turned all six of its legs skyward and gasped for breath.  

Today, Skagway has a population of about 300 souls - a few commercial fishermen, a few summer tourists, and a few thirsty sourdoughs heading over the Chilcoot Pass to White Horse to buy a bottle of bonded hooch at the Canadian Government liquor store.  

There's no housing problem there.  Hundreds of houses are boarded up, others are sagging, or falling down.  Shingles that have known neither paint nor nails for years are blown off in the Woolly Winds, and they stay off.  Windows have been the targets for the small boys stones.  

The yachtsman who desires to spend his summers in Skagway may rent a furnished castle for $10 a month, or a dollar a month, if that's all he desires to pay.  The glory that was once Skagway's is now only a memory - but a memory that will live for ages in the fiction tales of Rex Beach and Garrett P. Serviss.

(Forgive this digression, but I found this review of Beach's work on Wikipedia - "...strong hairy men doing strong hairy deeds..." - really funny! )

Above- Skagway; the Arctic Brotherhood building

Library of Congress image

Returning from Skagway to Juneau, we didn't have such luck with the weather.  We had one day of good weather, and then a day of rain, which we spent in camp on a tiny island near Vanderbilt reef, where a mast sticking up out of the water is all that is left of the S. S. Princess Sophia, which went down in 1921 with a loss of 198 lives. (more like 350)

August 28th, 1915 - on her way to the Great War with Canadian troops

The third day we got fair weather, but along with it a Taku, a wind that took Ikigihk southward under a reefed sail so fast we steered with the rudder.  No motor could have kept up with the sail.  Although we were running before the wind, with the waves of Lynn Canal leaping at our stern like a pack of hungry jackals, there were times when Wiedey decided he could heave water overboard faster with a bucket than a bilge pump.  Somehow or another we managed to keep our little cockleshell afloat.  

We arrived off the entrance of Canoe Passage on the right tide, but missed the hole before we could drop sail.  There was no turning back.  It would have been suicide to have attempted it, so we hauled up the sail again, and ran before the wind completely around Douglas Island.  We passed up passenger steamers going in our direction, and seldom touched the water except to bounce to bounce from the top of one wave to the peak of the wave ahead.  There really wasn't much danger of swamping because the waves simply couldn't catch up with us.  



Late in the afternoon we had ridden the Taku into Stevens Passage, where the storm seemed to have blown itself out.  The sail became a useless rag.  We installed the motor and putt-putt-ed around the lower end of Douglas Island into Gastineau Channel, and met the tide coming out.  It took us from six o'clock until eleven to push our way up the ten miles of Gastineau Channel from Stevens Passage to Juneau.  Nevertheless, it was still daylight when we got there, cold, wet, and hungry.


Seattle was still a thousand miles away, and the long Alaskan days were beginning to grow shorter - betokening the encroachment of winter.  There was no time to be lost, so we sailed southward the following morning, with Twin Glacier Camp on the Taku River, 35 miles south of Juneau, as the destination to be reached at the end of our first day's southward cruising.  

Twin Glacier Camp is the hunting lodge of Dr. H. C. DeVighne, a Juneau physician and sportsman with whom we had become acquainted during our sojourn in the Alaskan capital. He gave us a letter to Mrs. Felix Gray, caretaker of the camp, and bade us go there, and make ourselves at home.

All morning we cruised down the Stevens Passage, and towards noon turned into the entrance of Taku Inlet.  About this time a monstrous mountain of emerald green and chalky white loomed up ahead of us.  It was the first iceberg encountered on the southward cruise.  This particular berg appeared to be about five acres in area, and stuck up out of the water some 60 to 75 feet.  We headed toward it to get a closer view, but when we got within about three hundred yards of it, the berg suddenly decided to turn turtle!  It rolled over like a sick cow, sank down almost completely out of sight, and then began bobbing slowly up and down.  By this time we had changed our course.  We were going straight away from the iceberg - boosted along on monstrous swells that seemed to be higher than the berg itself when we were alongside it.  But, we'd learned something.  We were assured that icebergs are dangerous playmates for small boats.



 Although we sought to give all icebergs as wide a berth as possible thereafter, a certain amount of uncomfortably close association with them was unavoidable in navigating Taku Inlet.  The whole inlet was so full of floating ice that they could have been avoided only by turning tail, and hauling out of inlet.  These bergs are merely fragments of glacial ice that topple off the ends of Taku Glacier, Norris Glacier, Twin Glaciers and a miscellaneous assortment of glaciers that discharge into the Taku River and Taku Inlet.  The bergs ranged in size from pieces of ice no bigger than a man's head to great chunks of iridescent emerald green and white as big as the biggest office building in America.

The big bergs, of course, were easily avoided.  It was the little ones that truly endangered us.  Anyone who has observed a piece of ice floating in a glass knows that ice floats with only about one-eighth of its bulk out of the water.  So, a berg that appeared to be no larger than a mans head on the surface, would in reality be a chunk of ice weighing about 100 or 150 pounds; all that would be necessary to have torn the entire bottom out of Ikigihk's spruce planking had we run afoul of one at full speed ahead.

Before we had gone far up Taku Inlet, we found it necessary to adjust the water pump on the motor to reduce the quantity of water flowing through the cylinder jacket.  The water was at such a low temperature that the motor could not attain proper thermal efficiency until this change in the water pump adjustment was made.

In adjusting the pump it was necessary for me to get my hands in the water.  Almost instantly every joint, and my fingers, ached as if they had been pounded with a mallet.  In about half a minute those members became totally paralyzed.  Getting overboard in such water is not a pleasant thought.


No matter what kind of swimmer one might be, he'd have about as much a chance as a blind mouse at a cat convention.  I had previously learned from native Alaskans that only about one in a hundred can swim a single stroke.  They virtually live on the water, and do most of their traveling in boats, but its the hundredth man who is a swimmer.


We entered Taku Inlet on the inflowing tide.  This helped our speed, but added nothing to our safety from the menace of icebergs.  All the bergs that had gone visiting down Stevens Passage during the day were migrating back up Taku Inlet on the inflowing tide.  Many times we found it necessary to go dangerously near gigantic cornices of ice i order to pass between two mountains of refrigeration material.  In some places the inlet was almost choked with ice, and as we wiggled our way along through the floes, no peace of mind was added by the fact that the shores were sometimes two and three miles away - and those shores' perpendicular walls of ice-scoured rock where a landing would have been impossible.  Moreover, when this mass was hurtling along up the inlet on an eight knot current, the prospect of getting caught between two big bergs was anything but a nerve tonic.

Every now and then we'd see two bergs try to elbow each other out of the channel.  They'd strike with a roar that set the surrounding landscape echoing for miles around.  Down into the water would go tons and tons of ice from the points of contact on the two bergs, and then all the surrounding icebergs would hurl back the accumulated echoes.  The trip up Taku Inlet was a real adventure - a scene, and an experience to be remembered forever.  But, while it lasted, I'll admit there was some satisfaction in the thought that my life insurance policies are of the incontestable variety - the kind that pays, even for suicide!





We got alongside Taku Glacier just as the sun began getting down to the point to produce sunset colors.  Trying to describe a live glacier is an almost impossible task.  It is too much like trying to describe the Grand Canyon of Arizona, a thing utterly indescribable.  Then put the sunset colors onto Taku, and the finishing touch of indecribability is added.








Imagine, if you can, sitting at the helm of a sixteen foot motor boat, cruising along the face of a perpendicular ice wall 350 feet high, and ten miles long.  You're pretty busy dodging floating icebergs.  Every few seconds a few million tons of ice topple off the summit of the glacier and goes crashing down into the water with a roar like a 16-inch naval gun.  When those ice masses come down, there's something else going to happen soon - you're going to get a sample of what the North Atlantic is like in a sixteen foot boat in a storm.  Tremendous waves go hurtling out across the inlet from the face of the glacier.  A mountain of water comes rolling toward you, and you swing the bow around to take it nose on.  For a few breathless seconds you're out to break the altitude records - going up almost perpendicularly.  But the summit of the wave slides under the keel, and your little cockleshell goes careening wildly down the backside of the wave.  A few lesser waves, and it's over - but the noise out in the inlet made by the hundreds of icebergs disturbed by the swells, grinding and crashing together.

This video is pretty much what he describes...

 Add to this, these original masses of whitish-emerald green and Prussian blue, icebergs and ice walls; dab them with every color of the rainbow in the setting sun; and you've got a picture that lingers in one's memory like some fantastical nightmare.

(to be continued)