Kachemak Bay

 We stopped in Homer, Alaska, a small town on the Kenai Peninsula, on Kachemak Bay.  I took a boat ride into the bay.

The cormorants here are pelagic cormorants, but we did see one double-crested cormorant that was a long way from home.

Some of the islands are loaded with birds.

Sea otters are playful.  They love to swim on their backs.

Rocky islands were both plentiful and attractive.

This, understandably, is called Elephant Island.

We have seen bald eagles almost daily on this trip.  Generally they have been at a distance.  This eagle was on a rocky outcrop not too far away.

The naturalist was excited to see this young black bear.  It was the first black bear she had seen on this island all summer.

Salmon Hatchery

 

We visited a salmon hatchery outside Valdez, Alaska.  

A gazillion seagulls hovered around.  Between the fog and the constant motion, I couldn't get a good photo to illustrate how many there were.

A gull was ready to pounce.

A flock of gulls rested after a meal.

The salmon are so tightly packed it is hard to understand how they can maneuver.

Several sea lions thought this was a great place to pack on some pounds to survive the coming winter.

A Foggy Day

It was VERY foggy in Valdez, Alaska.  

Sometimes mountains peeked out.

The fog lifted a bit near us but stayed put behind a row of trees and in the mountains.

 Fog.  Clear.  Fog.  Clear.  Fog.

Puffballs.

I thought this was very pretty.

Valdez

We spent a foggy day in Valdez, Alaska.  Valdez suffered the biggest earthquakes ever recorded in the USA on Good Friday of1964.  The old town was abandoned and a new town was built four miles away.  

This old mural is on the side of a store in the new town of Valdez.  It has a prospector ion one side, an eagle on the other, bookending "The All-American Route."

Linked to Monday Murals.

RIB Ride

 We took a ride on a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) in Sitka.  Sitka is one of the few ports in southern Alaska that sits on the Pacific Ocean, not an inlet.

This is a different RIB from the same company.

We saw some lazy sea lions.

A little further out we saw dozens of sea otters.

We saw a "glacier errata," a huge rock left behind on an island after the glacier went onward.

We had a good lunch on Finn Island before returning to Sitka.

Haines, Alaska

 

Haines is near the northern end of Alaska's inside passage, on a thin peninsula between the Chilkat and Chilkoot Rivers.  It is a small town of fewer than 2,000 residents, overseen by the  Chilkoot band of the Tlingit indigenous people.  

Tourists visit Haines to see an example of a small Alaskan community away from big cities, as well as to see one of the bigger concentrations of bald eagles and brown bears.

On the top of a hillside above Haines sits Fort William H. Seward, a National Historic Landmark.  It was initially built to keep an eye on unruly mobs during a gold rush.  It also provided an American military outpost during the time the United States and Canada disputed the boundary.

Bears

 I went on a trip for a couple of hours with a professional photographer in Haines, Alaska.  Foolishly, I did not ask in advance where we would go and what we would photograph.  So, I brought my iPhone and a general purpose camera with a narrow range.  Good if we were going to take landscape photos.

Well, we ended up seeing a mother brown bear and her four cubs!  Fortunately, my iPhone 14 Pro Max was just fine for many of the shots when the bears were near.

And with heavy cropping the iPhone was also OK for catching the four bear cubs huddling on a rock waiting for mama to catch some salmon they could share.

A friend who is a serious photographer now leaves his "real" cameras behind and shoots exclusively with an iPhone 17 Pro Max.  I tried one recently at an Apple Store.  I'm going to get an iPhone 18 Pro Max when it is released in the coming months.  Who knows?  I might get on that train, too.

Icy Strait Point

 Icy Strait Point is a cruise landing area in Alaska's inland passage.  It is at the northern end of the Alexander Archipelago.  At one time it was the busiest cannery in the world.  Today there are no canneries in Icy Point.  The buildings have been taken over by restaurants and shops for tourists.

I went on a trip to the Spasski River Valley, an area noted for lots of bears and bald eagles.  I saw a gazillion salmon in the river, but no bears.  I did see a couple of bald eagles in the distance, further away than I see them in Florida.  With a long camera lens and cropping, this eagle image is the only one I kept. 

Totem Bight State Historical Park

Totem Bight State Historical Park is ten miles north of Ketchikan, Alaska.  

It is an 11-acre park with 15 restored and re-carved Tlingit and Haida totems.

 In 1938 the U.S. Forest Services began a program to salvage and reconstruct Alaskan totem poles. 

With Civilian Conservation Corps funds, skilled carvers from among the older indigenous people were hired to teach young artisans the art of carving totem poles, and totems that had been left to rot in the woods were either repaired or duplicated.