Experiencing Southeast Alaska

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Outside Magazine April 2004

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Destinations: Alaskan Archipelago
Alaska’s Secret Island Realm (cont.)


	Glacial pace: Paddling through Glacier Bay (Robin Hood/Alaska Tourism Marketing Council)

SO IT GOES IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA. One moment you're savoring a pristine wilderness; the next you're scrambling to save your ass. Also known as Alaska's panhandle, or just "Southeast," the region dangles off the western edge of British Columbia. On the map it's a frayed green fringe punctuated by toothy peaks and massive glaciers that give way to the Alexander Archipelago, a dense network of some 1,100 islands blanketed with towering Sitka spruce and cedar. Stretching 400 miles north to south, from Glacier Bay to Misty Fjords, and about 100 miles across, Southeast encompasses the 16.8-million-acre Tongass National Forest—the core of the world's largest temperate rainforest—and enough bears, whales, otters, eagles, and salmon to make you feel like you've been genetically shortchanged for not being born with fur, blubber, or feathers. (For now there are almost no roads, but that could soon change: Last December the Bush administration exempted the Tongass from the Clinton-era "roadless rule.")

But beware: Southeast is wet. Rainfall in the southern region averages 140 inches a year, nearly four times as much as in Seattle. Every town is a port, so going anywhere means boarding a boat. Which is to say, rubber boots are the footwear of choice. The 71,000 hardy permanent residents seem impervious to anything but the heaviest downpours. In 1996, at the end of my first trip to Southeast, I'd spent three days waiting for a ferry in the fishing town of Petersburg, feeling like a wimp each time I left my hotel room in a Gore-Tex jacket. The locals never wore more than cotton sweatshirts.

That summer I'd completed a 28-day, 360-mile kayaking expedition through Misty Fjords National Monument and a stretch of the Inside Passage between Ketchikan and Petersburg. Six years later, I'd sailed with Toby between the same two towns for ten days along a slightly more exposed route. Last summer I wanted to explore the more rugged outer coast to the north. So, after Toby, Andrew, and I met in Sitka—a tidy town of 8,800 featuring 150-year-old Russian architecture—we set sail for the West Chichagof-Yakobi Wilderness, a 265,000-acre expanse dotted with hundreds of barrier islands that serve as rookeries for murres and auklets, rocky hangouts for seals, and feeding grounds for humpback whales. We had our own boat, fishing gear, binoculars, bear spray, and three pounds of fine Italian salami. Come hell or high water—and both did—we would survive.

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