Lituya Bay to Cape Spencer
Nature, wishing to make amends for treating us so rudely with her storms, now blessed us with climatic perfection. On the day of our departure from Yakutat, the earliest rays of the subarctic sun rose in a cloudless sky painting the far off ice shrouded mountains in muted shades of orange. As we said our goodbyes and cast off lines, all of us regretted leaving this magical bay, one of the very special places on earth.Passing out of Yakutat Bay and over its bar, we turned southwest heading for the wonders of Lituya Bay, some 85 miles down the coast. Along the way, we hung close to the shore the better to sense the grandeur of the scenes unfolding before us. Colossal mountains clothed in new snow stood glittering in the early light. Glaciers winding among the peaks reached to the sea and high shelves of spruce lined the shore. But all this is merely foreground for one of Nature’s most exuberant displays, the 15,300-foot high Mount Fairweather. Other mountains along this coast are higher, but none sits so near the shore and none is so broad shouldered as Fairweather. Its immense icy mass eclipsed much of the horizon as we passed by in awe.
Just 60 yards wide and its channel lined with shallow rocks and boulders, the entrance into Lituya Bay is singularly uninviting. But once safely through, we found ourselves in what has been called the “Yosemite of the North.” It is one of Alaska’s most spectacular and serenely beautiful, and at once latently sinister, bays. Tiny by Alaskan standards, it is just two miles across and eight miles long. At its head, stands a 7,000-foot high wall of gray stone sheathed much of the year in a thick blanket of snow and ice, and along its sides are steep heavily forested hills rising to 3,000 feet. During our time there, I had the sense of floating in a magnificently sculptured well.
On the Fourth of July, 1958, a powerful earthquake struck just offshore agitating a fault line that runs through the head of the bay and setting loose a gigantic slide of earth, rock and ice. The resulting splash wave cleared timber on an enclosing hill to a height of 1,720 feet, the largest tsunami wave ever recorded. Still today, we saw its effects in the contrast between the older timber that escaped the wave and the new growth. That was only the latest in a long series of geologic cataclysms in the bay. Geologists warn that it will, not may, happen again, though just when, nobody knows.
Just as we were safely inside the bay, we saw a scrawny brown bear standing forlornly at the mouth of a creek trying to fatten up on the last of the salmon run before going into hibernation. As we watched, he grabbed a salmon, juggled it awkwardly and dropped it. Little wonder his ribs were showing.
At the chancy business of catching fish, though, we did no better. I had earlier made the mistake of mentioning to our mate Tucker that fresh halibut are now fetching $8 a pound for the fisherman. With an avaricious gleam in his eye, he affixed his newly bought sure thing lures to the lines on our two fishing poles, dropped them expectantly into the water and waited for the slimy gold that soon would be his. Keeping unblemished our nearly spotless reputation for not catching fish—eco-fishing, we call it—Tucker gave up after hours of effort without the barest suggestion of a strike. It’s a good thing he doesn’t hibernate.
After a blissful night anchored behind Cenotaph Island, a lone patch of rock and timber in the bay’s center, we rose to another idyllic day, hoisted anchor and made our way out of that narrow channel into the Gulf of Alaska. Once again, we hugged the coastline the better to take in the panorama we knew Nature had in store for us.
Over the ensuing four hours, we made our way past one of the world’s largest tidewater glaciers, the La Perouse, and some forty uninterrupted miles of still more snowy massifs lined up along the coast like Manhattan skyscrapers along the Hudson. When at last we rounded Cape Spencer and entered the protected waters of the Inside Passage, there was among us all a noticeable sense of relief that we no longer had to contend with the often difficult seas in the Gulf of Alaska but regret that we had departed from the world’s most magnificent coast.
The attached photo was taken from the town dock at Yakutat, just an everyday scene for the people who live and work there. The enormous mountain in the distance, 70 miles from the dock, is Mount Saint Elias (18,000 feet), one of the world’s highest coastal mountains.