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.)
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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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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Above- Skagway; the Arctic Brotherhood building |
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| 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)
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| 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.
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...
(to be continued)
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