Capturing the Moment

  My coworker, Christian, took this photo from one of our small boats. I am in the middle in the orange, setting up a paddle high-five in front of Holgate Glacier. I led a wonderful, five mile kayak trip today in the beautiful Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward, Alaska. My group of ten and I paddle through a fjord, past thousand foot waterfalls, up to the face of Holgate Glacier. This glacier had some of the bluest ice that I've seen. It was very low tide, and the glacier was resting on a sandy/rocky bottom, so we were able to safely get very close. On our paddle we came across a family of river otters as well as a mom and baby sea otter. There were a few water birds, with the horned puffin being the big star. But the glacier was by far the most memorable sight of the morning. I don't think the guests will forget looking up from the kayaks at a two hundred foot tall wall of ice, disappearing off into the horizon in front of them. There is something so special about explorin...

  Jumping into Unakwik Inlet like... Today we explored a wondrous place called Unakwik Inlet here in Prince William Sound, Alaska. This was the epicenter of the 1964 Good Friday earthquake. It measured 9.2 on the richtor scale, making one side of the fjord raise up 12 feet while they other side sank down. Dead trees can still be seen along the inlet on our way up to Meares glacier at the end. Meares glacier is always an exciting one to explore, because it is advancing instead of retreating, like almost all the other glaciers in the world. If you get close enough you can see where the glacier is slow motion bulldozing its way through the rainforest, knocking trees over and pushing earth in front of it as it advances. We had some guests kayaking and others exploring by small boat, but I wanted to take people on a hike to the glacier face. This is one of the most unique hikes that I've found up here in Prince William Sound. We landed on an easy rocky beach. Then we crossed a small str...

  One of my favorite photos of the day. This scene was on tripod hill, about 1,000ft up. The cloud layer was just above us, but we could see forever just underneath it. The lands now known as Cordova, Alaska were originally the home of the Eyak people. The story is that the Eyak people paddled down the mighty Copper River, then found Eyak lake stocked with beautiful red salmon. They decided to stay along the shores and never left. The Eyak people can still be found in Cordova town today, and a trip to the cultural center, Ilanka, is always high on my list of stops. Fast forward to the Spanish explorer, Salvador Fidalgo, in 1790, the current name of Cordova for the townsite has stuck. However it was the discovery of copper in Kennekott, and the need for a port to ship it from, that created the first boom for Cordova. From 1911 to 1938, 200 tons of high grade copper ore moved through the port of Cordova. The economy switched to a fishing town after the ore ran out, and it is still a ...