GLACIER BAY
The morning that David and I departed for Glacier Bay, I got up at around five and tiptoed toward the Heacox kitchen. Melanie had already gone to support her last interpretive ranger’s solo debut. Before leaving, she had laid out a full breakfast, along with a note on formal stationery thanking me for coming to visit and a plastic bag of brownies with instructions to eat them if we got hungry. At six fifteen, David and Brittney arrived in the Econoline and we drove down to the dock at Bartlett Cove. We loaded our kayak and packs and bear canisters stuffed with food onto the daily tour boat that makes the 130-mile run up and down Glacier Bay.
Considering it costs about the same as a trip on the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, the Glacier Bay “day boat” (as everyone calls it) may offer the best bang for your buck in all of Southeast Alaska. You get a full day of sightseeing in one of the world’s most beautiful places, a soda and sandwich for lunch, free coffee, and narration from one of Melanie’s well-drilled park rangers. Ours was named Kaylin. She sat in a booth with David and me as the day boat cruised into the bay and told us about her plan to return to Iowa at summer’s end to attend nursing school. Then she excused herself, walked to the front of the room, and grabbed a microphone.
David and I went out to the stern to observe some cute wildlife, mostly backstroking sea otters and birds. When Kaylin announced over the PA system, “There are puffins at two o’clock,” a woman with a howitzer-size camera rushed over from the opposite side of the observation deck and elbowed her way past us to the railing. Mostly, everyone wanted to see whales.
“There was a week out here last year when you could almost walk across the whales,” David said. “You almost don’t want to paddle nearby, because when a whale goes down you don’t know where it’s going to surface. It could be a quarter mile away.”
We slowed as we approached South Marble Island, a small lump of limestone amid fertile waters that made it irresistible to the thousands of birds that nest in the island’s slopes and crevices. A chorus of belching sounds began to fill the air, followed by a powerful stench. “It’s not a full sea lion experience until you smell them,” David said. Sea lions crowded all over the island’s lower rocks, like ants on a dropped lollipop, waddling awkwardly and shoving one another into the water. The instant they submerged, they began to swim with the grace of dolphins. As the other passengers snapped photos of a cormorant swallowing a fish that wriggled its way down the bird’s long neck, David tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Look behind you.” To the south, six whales were spouting, their spray like depth charges in the still water.
“Off to the right you can see Muir Point,” Kaylin said over the PA. “There’s a pile of rocks there that was once a cabin built by John Muir.” She ran through some of the highlights of Muir’s visits to Glacier Bay: the skepticism about his Yosemite glacier theory, Fort Wrangell, Hall Young, the four Tlingit guides, Vancouver’s charts. A passenger asked why we couldn’t visit the Muir Glacier, and Kaylin explained that it had pulled back so far that it no longer reached the water. We’d gone about twenty miles since Bartlett Cove and still hadn’t covered half the distance that the glacier had retreated between 1794 and 1879.
The further we followed Muir’s path, the younger the landscape became. With each mile, trees shrank in size until they vanished altogether. Mountain goats loitered on scarred rocky faces decorated with patches of green. We eventually reached the head of the bay. The ice had retreated northward more than ten additional miles since 1899. For half an hour we idled in front of two adjacent glaciers. The one on the left was the Margerie Glacier, which had stepped into the Muir Glacier’s starring role as the bay’s berg-discharging crowd-pleaser. Every ten minutes or so, a sound like a shotgun blast rang out and a chunk of ice would calve off its blue face, making a roar and a splash.
The glacier to the Margerie’s right, the Grand Pacific Glacier, looked sad by comparison. This was the primary remnant of the ice mountain that had so fired Muir’s imagination, the mighty glacier that had once filled and carved Glacier Bay. From the observation deck of the day boat it looked pathetic, like a pile of dirty snow left to melt in the corner of a mall parking lot.
I’d been enjoying the ride so much that I almost forgot our ultimate plan, until David stepped away for a few minutes and returned wearing waterproof pants and knee-high rubber boots. “It’s about that time,” he said, and I went off to change. The day boat pulled into a cove and the captain slowly idled toward the rocky shore, taking us so close that with a running start we could’ve leaped to dry land. (Well, one of us could have.) A deckhand dropped an aluminum ladder from the bow, David and I climbed down, and with help from the boat’s crew we unloaded our gear, bucket brigade style: packs, tents, bear cans, and finally the kayak. The whole process took less than five minutes. Our fellow passengers with whom we’d been chatting all day crowded to the edge of the top deck and watched us. The boat backed away. A little girl waved. And then we were alone in the wilderness.
I wasn’t quite sure where we were geographically, but a quick glance at the map oriented me in history. We were at the Scidmore Cut, named for the early Glacier Bay travel enthusiast Eliza Scidmore. The Scidmore Cut connected the mainland to the Gilbert Peninsula, named for the Harriman Expedition’s other glaciologist, G. K. Gilbert. Across the water stood Mount Merriam.
David gave me some basic paddling instructions, pantomimed how to step into our two-person kayak without tipping it over, and demonstrated how to put on a waterproof apron called a spray skirt. “When I’m leading groups, I can pretty much tell it’s going to be a long day when I use the term ‘spray skirt’ and the guys moan,” he said. “Sometimes I say ‘spray kilt’ instead, to skip the aggravation.”
And then, before the strangeness of being abandoned in a giant stone tureen of chilled soup could sink in, we were in the water and paddling. The vastness of the space made us feel as if we’d entered another dimension, like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. Row after row of towering dark rock with white caps extended in all directions. The lower hillsides beneath the peaks were a velvety green. The water was blue and clear, except where glacial grinding was doing its work, the rock dust creating pools of what looked like chocolate milk. Since I had no idea what the scale of anything was, I had no idea how fast we were moving. (The answer, I later learned, was “not very fast.”) The motion was rhythmic and satisfying. When I got tired, I floated while David continued paddling. The kayak would slow down a little. When David took one of his occasional breaks, we slowed almost to a stop. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we put our paddles down to eat a mouthful of trail mix, but mostly we were quiet. As we approached our final turn, the reflection of the sun shimmered on the water’s glassy surface like millions of fireflies.
We had paddled for four hours into a relatively strong wind, finally entering into the mouth of Reid Inlet, a two-mile-long cove with a neon-blue glacier anchoring one end. The air chilled and a breeze rose up as we reached the spit of land on which we would be camping. “Every glacier makes its own weather,” David said. The spot was cartoonishly idyllic: a curved, secluded beach with a waterfall that hummed in the background, a rhythm track supporting the massive glacier creaking through its growing pains.
David pulled out the tide chart that he kept in his pocket and checked every so often. The tides in Glacier Bay can rise or fall twenty-five feet, and do so twice each day. We emptied the kayak and carried it up past the fringe of dried seaweed that demarcated the high-water mark. Just beyond that, the bare sand stopped and tall vegetation sprang up suddenly. “Bears like to walk along the tree line,” David said, pacing the strip. “If you look just inside and outside the line, it often looks just like a manicured path from all the traffic.” He found a few old tracks and some ancient-looking scat, which meant we were probably safe. We pitched our tents on a bed of tiny yellow flowers that crunched under our boots.
Geologically speaking, this spot was brand-new. When the Harriman team sailed past here in 1899, Reid Inlet had been filled with ice. The alchemical process that was taking place around us is called primary succession, nature’s way of turning stone into forests. The flowers were dryas, plant gentrifiers that enriched the new soil with nitrogen. Low, dense thickets of willow, alder, and cottonwood would follow. Once a layer of decaying biomass had been laid down over several decades, giant spruce and hemlock trees would colonize the land.
The idea of Glacier Bay National Park as “a world unaltered by humans,” as the orientation video described it, makes sense when you’re sitting on virgin soil in front of a glacier. Half a million visitors come through on cruise ships each year, and many more would if they could: The National Park Service limits entry to only two large ships each day, in addition to some smaller tourist vessels. Only a tiny fraction of that number spend the night—568 backcountry campers in 2015, in an area the size of Connecticut. (Yosemite, less than a quarter of Glacier Bay’s size, hosted more than two hundred thousand backcountry campers in the same period.) Maintaining the same environment for future generations is a primary goal of the NPS.
David is a staunch environmentalist, but he thinks the Park Service might be overdoing the pristine-wilderness angle. “The definition of ‘wilderness’ isn’t what this place looked like before the first white man got here—there were people living here for thousands of years,” he said. It was also a little silly to pretend that giant cruise ships weren’t coming through every day. Their presence didn’t bother David nearly as much as I expected it to. “I think anyone who wants to visit this place—young, old, in a wheelchair—should be able to,” he said. “If people never see the parks, they don’t care about them.”
David prepared a pot of lentils over the camp stove and talked about the clever eating habits of some of the animals we’d seen during our parade. Sea otters will find a sharp rock they like and keep it tucked under one forefoot as they dive for shellfish. “Starfish—people think they’re cute, but they’re brutal killers,” he said, holding up a mollusk shell with a hole punched in it. The starfish forces its way into a bivalve’s shell, pushing its stomach into the prey’s space and digesting the creature in its own home. I’d never given much thought to ravens until coming to Alaska, where they are prominent in Native culture. (All Tlingit traditionally belong to one of two moieties, or clans—Eagle or Raven. A person is supposed to marry someone in the opposite moiety.) David said the respect for ravens was well deserved. “I’ve seen ravens in Gustavus drop clams and mussels on the road, wait for someone to drive over them to crack the shell, then swoop down and eat them,” he said. “A raven will not only remember if someone has been kind or unkind to them; they’ll tell their friends, too.”
As for the most famously omnivorous member of Alaska’s animal community, David disagreed with the idea that guns are the best insurance policy. “Statistically, you’re better off with bear spray than a firearm, which tends to turn people into Dirty Harry,” he said. “Bears are kind of like cats. They’re curious. They either take one look at you and decide they want to hang out with you or they just skulk off. I’ve never had a bad experience with bears. I’ve only pulled my bear spray once and never fired it.”
David was one of Gustavus’s citizens who’d written a novel in his spare time. (Like most first-time fiction writers, he’d drawn heavily on his autobiography. Unlike most first-time male fiction writers, he’d made his protagonist a woman.) He asked a few questions about what it was like to make a living from writing. Did I enjoy it? Did I jump out of bed in the morning eager to get to work?
“Working as a guide, I meet so many people who just don’t seem to be happy,” he said. “I guess I don’t understand someone who has a job only to make money.” He’d asked a friend who’s an alpine guide, which certainly sounds like the sort of dream job you’re supposed to get after realizing you’re not cut out to be a tax lawyer, how much she liked guiding. “She said, ‘You enjoy it when you summit, and especially when you get back down.’ I love everything about kayaking: the beginning, middle, and end. I’m not getting rich here, but I love kayaking, and I get to do it every day.” When his parents wanted to give David a special gift after graduating from college, they’d purchased him a handmade kayak.
David had recently lost his temper in Seattle, sitting in traffic, thinking about the colossal waste of time. “I realized there might be people out there driving an hour each way,” he said. I told him I knew several people who drove twice that daily in New York. He was mortified, but supposed that it was necessary due to NYC’s high cost of living. “You’d probably pay two thousand dollars a month for an apartment like they have on TV, right?” He was not comforted when I told him that amount might rent you a nice parking space in Manhattan.
David rinsed out the dishes and confiscated my toothpaste for the bear canister, and we went off to sleep. As I was lying in my tent, the Reid Glacier calved a good-night salvo of thunderclaps. All night it discharged chunks into the water. In one of nature’s finest lodgings, I’d managed to book a room next to the ice machine.
In the morning, the winds had died down and swarms of biting midges and brown flies had converged on camp. I pulled out my mesh bug net and secured my ball cap over it. This, I soon learned, was the exact wrong strategy, since it compressed the net against my forehead, giving the insects a handy place to rest their legs as they bit my face ad libitum. For the next three weeks I wore a line of red dots across my forehead like a doll’s hairline as a scarlet letter, broadcasting my ignorance to veteran Alaskans.
The Park Service may promote a “leave no trace” philosophy to Glacier Bay visitors today, but there was a time when even homesteading was possible here. After breakfast, David and I paddled across the cove to what remained of the summer cabin that Muz and Joe Ibach had built around 1939 to trap furs and prospect for gold. When Kim Heacox paddled through here in 1979, the Ibach cabin had contained enough elements of a preserved twentieth-century archaeological site to mount a production of Death of a Salesman: dishes, cutlery, books, playing cards, a table and chair, an old copy of Life magazine. Today all that remained was a pile of planks, three spruce trees planted by Muz, and some of the detritus of long and lonely Alaska days: a fifty-five-gallon drum, a red can of heating oil (advertising “2 cents off” on the label), one leather shoe. A bear had gathered moss in a pile for a bed and left behind plenty of evidence that it had been subsisting on a diet of mollusks. “That’s got to hurt passing through,” David said, wincing as he toed the sharp-edged shells with his rubber boot.
We walked through a patch of tall rye grass that looked like wheat. David said that some early Alaska homesteaders had noticed the similarity and used it to make flour. Only later did they learn that the grain was infested with a fungus called ergot, which when consumed can have an unpleasant and powerful hallucinogenic effect. “Imagine what a long and strange winter that must’ve been,” he said. While studying the alkaloids produced by ergot in the late 1930s, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD.
We kayaked leisurely across the bay toward Russell Island. One of us who was not a particularly skilled swimmer tried not to fixate on the water being just a few degrees above freezing and almost a quarter mile deep. A pair of bald eagles perched at the water’s edge on Russell’s south end eyeballed us, a two-on-two staring contest rigged in their favor. Muir had come to this very spot in 1879. Back then, the thousand-foot-high island had been half-embedded in ice, marking “the head of the bay” and the furthest reach of the glacier that in Vancouver’s time had stretched all the way to Gustavus. “A short time ago,” Muir wrote of the rock, “it was at least two thousand feet beneath the surface of the over-sweeping ice; and under present climatic conditions it will soon take its place as a glacier-polished island in the middle of the fjord.” And so it had.
From the seat of our kayak, Russell Island didn’t look like a particularly easy climb even without ice, but Muir in his usual way had managed to scramble to the top for a better view of the Grand Pacific Glacier, the greatest he’d ever seen. Looking north from this spot must have been like sitting in a cathedral of ice.
We spent much of the day paddling a circle around the island, landing at the rocky beach on the north end. The stones ranged from tiny M&M-size scree to massive, sharp-edged hunks of granite the size of large appliances—multi-ton reminders of the pushing power of the ice river that had once plowed through here.
Once again we unloaded the kayak, carried it up past the seaweed line, and set up camp. Nature had thoughtfully left behind one flat rock on which to set up the stove, next to another that made an ideal dining table. The weather was probably a little too perfect. With no wind, the midges had returned, so thick that we put on our mosquito nets. We lay down on the stone beach and took in the view. “Wow,” David said.
Our campsite was centered, like the bubble on a carpenter’s level, between two rows of snowcapped peaks. The mountains on each side of Glacier Bay converged toward the horizon to frame the Grand Pacific Glacier. What had looked dirty and stunted up close now shone blindingly white in the midafternoon sun. The glacier swirled up deep into Canada. I could finally understand how its ice might be capable of filling this entire bay.
I awoke around four to the pop-pop-pop of bloodthirsty bugs hurling themselves against the liner of my tent. This being mid-June in Alaska, sunrise was at 3:51 A.M., so even though some time would pass before the sun cleared the peaks to the east, the day had already broken when I pulled on my knee-high boots and my fine-mesh bug net and walked down to the beach, looking like a pig farmer turned bank robber on a lost episode of Kojak. I sat on a rock pushed there by a glacier and stared down the fjord. The ravenous midges had been joined by swarms of Alaska’s state bird, the mosquito, and both swirled around my head like commas and periods in the sort of bad punctuation nightmare a grammarian might have after eating hallucinogenic rye grass.
The air was chilly, part morning temperatures and part glacial cross-breezes. Chunks of ice glided slowly past in the water. A high ceiling of cloud obscured the tops of the highest peaks. The day’s first strong sunlight flashed like rosy lightning into the shadows of the fjord, and I thought of Muir’s reaction to the same phenomenon from a nearby vantage point: “We stood hushed and awe-stricken, gazing at the holy vision, and had we seen the heavens open and God made manifest, our attention could not have been more tremendously strained.”
I sat down, wrapped my arms around myself, and tried to absorb nature’s magnificence. The water was like spilled paint. A pair of harbor seals poked their bowling-ball faces above its surface before diving and leaving concentric rings behind. All down the beach, seaweed-covered rocks glowed brown and gold in the rising morning sun.
And then, in the corner of my eye, one of the rocks started moving.
I stood up suddenly and kicked a loose stone down the beach. The noise caught the attention of the moving object, which on further review was a brown bear, perhaps 150 yards away. I tried to gauge its size, but what the hell did I know—this was the first bear I’d ever seen outside of a zoo. The details of the bear safety video I’d been required to watch at the ranger station two nights earlier were suddenly proving to be elusive. The bear and I stared at each other for a moment before it jogged off toward the thick wall of saplings that grew just behind the beach, stopping a few feet short.
A second bear emerged from the brush. A pair of bears likely meant cubs. Cubs meant their mother would soon follow. The first rule of bear encounters finally popped into my head: Never, ever, ever get between a mother bear and her cubs. Ever. In the canon of grisly deaths from grizzly attacks, accident reports involving angry moms were those most likely to employ nouns like “sinew” in conjunction with verbs like “tearing” and “chewing.”
As quickly and casually as a man can while walking backward in borrowed boots on slippery rocks, I retreated toward our tents as the bears watched.
I knew that David was expecting to sleep for at least a couple more hours, so it was with perhaps a shade more politeness than was merited under the circumstances that I leaned over his tent and spoke through the nylon. “Uh, David, I really hate to disturb you, but I think there may be two bears down here on the beach.”
“I’ll definitely get up for that,” David said groggily.
David was someone who didn’t function at peak speed until he’d had his morning coffee. He stepped out of his tent with serious bedhead and wearing baggy pajama bottoms with little wolves on them, looking like a giant second grader who awakened at a slumber party bewildered to find himself not in his own home. He had the can of bear spray in hand as we walked down to the beach.
“These two look about four years old,” he said as we approached the pair, who sniffed around the rocks near the waterline. “They were probably just recently separated from Mom. This island has no salmon, no blueberries, so there are no other big brown bears for them to worry about.” We watched them for a couple of minutes. “Those are some skinny, scraggly bears,” David said as he alternated tucking each of his sandaled feet behind the opposite calf to wipe off hungry mosquitoes. “Looks like the population of Russell Island today is two people, two bears, and two billion bugs.”
I wondered how—and when—they’d gotten here. “Are bears good swimmers?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. Bears swim. Moose swim. Deer swim. Wolves swim. If they think there’s something better to be found on another island, they’ll just go.”
David hopped up on a rock, clapped his hands, and shouted “Hey, bears!” a few times, in a tone that sounded as though he was trying to be encouraging. The pair walked back into the woods. David scratched his head and turned to look down the fjord. “Wow, look at this view, how the green light on the mountains turns the water emerald green. My favorite moment of the day.” He lifted his bug net for a moment to take in the colors of the CinemaScope panorama. “Actually, this might be my favorite spot I’ve ever woken up in in the park. And you got to see two bears! How about that?”
David set to work at the camp stove making breakfast, unscrewing the food canisters to take out the coffee and cereal. I’d assumed that if I ever saw a bear, I’d evacuate my bowels like an antelope that spots a lion on the savanna before fleeing, but in the event, I’d been more intrigued than terrified. David said that was pretty normal. “The park biologist here calls it bear-anoia. Beforehand, you’re all worried about gigantic teeth and claws, and then you actually see one and you go, ‘Oh!’ You clap your hands and it stands up and looks at you and runs away.”
The bears walked out of the woods once more, this time a little bit closer. David stood, clapped, and shouted a few times, a little louder than before. “Mark, come stand next to me so we appear bigger,” he said. “We want to look like a super-creature. See, there they go.” Once again, the pair stopped and turned toward the woods.
“I think we’ll just make coffee and skip the oatmeal today,” David said, pouring hot water into a water bottle with coffee grounds as the bears slunk off into the alders. One of them paused to look back at us, seemingly less than enthused about returning to the brush, before galloping away.
“Facing down a bear is like facing down a drunk: You just have to bluff that you’re tougher than he is,” David said.
I sat on the beach waiting for the coffee to steep while David went to fetch his rubber boots. The bears appeared again, but this time they were behind us, only about thirty feet from our tents. “Mark, I think we’ll take that coffee to go,” David shouted from up the beach. “Would you bring the bear spray, please?”
I stood next to David, waving, clapping, and screaming, this time with some edge to it. “Hey, bears!” The bears had the high ground. The bolder of the two had taken a sudden interest in my tent. A memory from yesterday passed through my mind: I had left a Clif Bar wrapper in the bottom of my backpack, hadn’t I? I was relieved when the bear left my tent and ambled in the direction of the kayak.
David, who had the sangfroid and the G-rated vocabulary of a man who works in the service industry, did not like this development at all. He started screaming so angrily that the vein stood out in his neck. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY KAYAK, YOU FUCKING BEAR!” The bear stood down as if taking offense and went back to sniffing outside the tents. “We have two days’ extra food and redundant water sources,” David explained. “But only one kayak.” If a curious bear stepped onto the thin fiberglass shell, it would punch a hole. The possibility of being trapped on this sliver of beach with two bears and one can of spray did not appeal to me, either. I remember this vividly, because I underlined it in my notebook, which, when I pulled it out later, had dozens of midges smushed between the pages.
“Are you taking notes?” David asked, his arms waving like semaphore flags high over his head.
“This is my job, dude,” I said, alternating scribbles with hand waves. “Gotta get this stuff down while it’s still hot.”
We shouted and waved, shoulder to shoulder, hoping the intruders would get the message. David unlocked the safety catch on the spray. The bolder bear was maybe thirty feet away, while the other hung back. The pair disappeared momentarily into the alders, but then returned right away.
“Guess they’re calling our bluff,” David said. “Mark, just throw all your stuff into your tent and drag it down to the beach. We’ll load up quickly and get the heck out of here.”
We collected the food canisters and stove, tossed packs and boots into our tents, and retreated like the British at Dunkirk, dive-bombed by no-see-ums and mosquitoes. My tent snagged on a rock. David snapped a pole. Just as we reached the water’s edge with the last pieces of gear, a gigantic white cruise ship with a sunburst painted on its side glided into view. I imagined the passengers looking through binoculars, wondering why two guys were frantically throwing things into a kayak as they swatted the air in front of their faces.
I coincidentally met the pilot of that ship a few days later, and he recalled seeing us from the bridge. “I thought, Man, look at that setup!” he said. “Those guys must be having the time of their lives.”
We shoved off, paddled away from shore, and paused to look back. The bears had come down to the water’s edge to hunt for mollusks. David poured very strong lukewarm coffee into mugs and we watched the brown brothers go about their business. “They’re actually pretty cute from this far away,” David said. “I guess they just wanted to get down to the beach the whole time. But it’s a good reminder about Alaska. You can be in awe of the beauty, but you have to remember that things can go from ‘Ooh, aah!’ to ‘Oh, shit!’ in an instant.”
For a third day, we’d been blessed with beautiful weather. We stripped down to T-shirts. A row of skyscraping mountains to the north came into view, still blanketed with snow. “Look at that—it’s like eight or nine Matterhorns all smashed together,” David said.
We spent our last night camped atop a patch of blooming strawberry plants behind a sandy beach. The only threat from wildlife was a long-legged oystercatcher who was convinced David wanted to raid her nest and made her displeasure known in car-alarm shrieks. In the morning we paddled slowly back to Scidmore Cut. The day boat glided to a stop, we hoisted our gear and kayak up the aluminum ladder, and the boat backed away from shore. The interpretive ranger announced our arrival, and everyone on board turned to look at us. We were dirty and smelly, and one of us had a strange ring of bug bites circling his forehead, but judging from the excited reception we got from the other passengers, you’d think we’d just been plucked out of an Apollo lunar module bobbing in the ocean.
One more nice thing about the Glacier Bay day boat: They sell beer. And if someone really wants to hear your story about your near-death run-in with two vicious brown bears, they might even buy you one.