Capturing the Moment

  I thought the clouds, the meadow, and the mountains all camme together for a great view in this photo. In true expedition fashion, we anchored the Safari Explorer off a bay that we had only explored in satellite photos and dreams. It was located in the Northeast corner of Wide Bay. It had a very shallow entrance, which meant we couldn't get the big boat into the bay. But this afternoon was high tide, and we planned to send out a kayaking group and a skiff tour, so I made the decision to move activities to this unnamed bay, and do a little exploring with the guests. I led the kayaking group, which was quite large. I had about 20 guests, in ten double kayaks with me. The bay is about 2 miles long, so I knew we were in for a workout, but we had all afternoon and were not in a big rush. We did have some waves outside the bay, where we anchored. Luckily the waves and breeze pushed all the kayakers towards the bay and towards a beautiful waterfall that would serve as our first gatherin...

One little misstep could mean disaster, when hiking in Alaska. I may have been playing it up a little for the camera here.   Walking on the plateau, with beautiful lakes and ponds between the ridges. There is some interesting geology going on here. What scenery! The landscape here at Wide Bay is out of this world. I couldn't believe our luck as the weather held out for another wonderful day of hiking on our 10 day Alaska expedition cruise. Today we are at an outer bay in the Ugashik district of the Alaskan Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge. What a mouthful. I had a group of hikers who wanted something in between a hard charger level and a beach walk easy level. The moderate hike was born. I took them to a very nice beach landing, where we slid out of the small boat into the shallow water. Not a problem since we all had the 'Alaskan tennis shoe' on, aka. big rubber boots. We saw a couple of red foxes playing farther down the beach. I had been here before, but I wanted to tr...

  Beautiful Imuya Bay, untouched wilderness, and we are here to explore. This is how you do expedition cruising. The spot I had picked out to take the guests to this morning, here off the wild coast of the Alaskan peninsula, was too wild with wind to be much fun. We searched around for a bit, but during our search I could see down the coast a few miles looked very nice and protected from the wind. We quickly looked at anchoring charts and satellite images of the spot, called Imuya Bay. We've never scouted it out, but it looked nice, so we changed our plans and moved the ship to our new anchorage. Imuya bay looked amazing. There were all these little islands that would be great for kayaking and skiffing around. The mountains in the back of the bay were jagged and stunning. Some still had snow on top and we could even see a glacier hanging up in the high valley. Shortly after anchoring, two white wolves were spotted running across a green hill behind the beach. Then right before kaya...