Alaskan Adventures of Mareth Griffith.
Page 5
Date: August 14, 2007
| Hello to Friends, Family, Bird People,
Theatre People, Smith People and Wine Shop People, I'm still in Alaska, and - it's starting to get dark up here. For the last few months that hasn't been happening. Or if it was getting dark, it was at 1 or 2 in the morning, when I generally was not awake to see it. But now that we are experiencing something vaguely similar to night, I find that I'm having more trouble adjusting to the darkness than I had to adjusting to the daylight. I mean, walking around at 10:00PM and still being able to see the mountains on the other side of the bay is just really convenient - not to mention unreal and gorgeous. In SeaLife Center news, Chloe the seal finally gave birth to her pup in late June - and judging by the weight of the little dude, he was probably very overdue (he was born with teeth!) Chloe was a very good first-time mother, and by the time the pup was weaned, he weighed over 70 pounds! The pup (Anchorage Zoo, his owners, haven't named him yet) had his first swim in the seal habitat today, where he discovered that you can't swim through the acrylic windows. The girls he's in with (our 2 and 3 year-old seals) aren't completely happy to have Junior in there with them - he's playful, but he bites. Kind of like suddenly giving them a really annoying younger brother. Our Rehab department is also in full swing, looking after about 15 abandoned or orphaned seal pups. We also have one year-old fur seal who evidently took a wrong turn after splitting up with mom, and ended up on a beach in Homer - several hundred miles from the nearest other fur seals. We have two sea otter pups as well. We can't release sea otter pups back into the wild, as they bond very quickly to people, (and need to spend more time in rehab than seal pups do). So, on some of the tours I give, the rehab staff will bring one of the otters out. Really cute. Also really destructive - I thought teething puppies were bad. Usually, the otter pup spends the whole time he's being held trying to destroy something that his keeper is wearing - sweatshirt tassle, shirt collar, ear, hair. The rehab staff refers to the otters as 'chainsaws with fur'. Last week I went camping in Denali. This is a huge national park in the middle of Alaska that prides itself on having great access to the wilderness interior of the park through its road and shuttle bus system - no private cars allowed - but, no trails or footpaths once you get out to the middle of the wilderness. Instead, you are supposed to make your own trail and walk around wherever in the wilderness you might want to go. When I first heard of this, I thought it might be some sort of supplemental bear feeding strategy - send the cruise ship tourists up to the middle of the wilderness, then encourage them to get themselves lost in the bear-filled woods.. It really does sound like a terrible idea. There are two factors that I did not take into account: (1) many tourists visiting Alaska have no desire to actually experience Alaska's outdoors, and (2) few plants in the tundra grow higher than your knees. (If you do see something bigger, it's probably a bear.) And, at the visitor center where you buy your bus tickets into the park, the warning signs about bear and moose danger do their best to intimidate any would-be hikers out of actually getting too far away from the park road. And if that weren't enough, the clouds of insects circling the shuttle bus windows, lying in wait for an unwary hiker to emerge, are the final line of defense in making sure that anyone who actually does leave the bus really is prepared for the experience. I spent my first few days in Denali with a field course on grizzly bear ecology, hiking around and looking at bears and bear habitat. It rained. A lot. The first two days I was there, it only stopped raining once - for about an hour. (I used the hiatus to set up my tent.) The tent was a borrowed one, and did not leak - I was thrilled - but other campers were not so fortunate. I spent my first day before I met up with the field course doing things at the entrance area - visitor center, and hiking a few trails near the entrance. I hiked out to the Denali sled dog kennels and see one of their presentations. I was one of only a few people who did not take the shuttle bus from the visitor center, and was therefore already very, very wet by the time I got there. This matched the very, very wet condition of the sled dogs, so I had no problem with the dogs jumping all over me. The other, dryer, tourists were not quite so charmed. After getting back to my campground, I met up with some similarly soppy campers near the camp laundry. We stripped down to as little as decency would allow, and threw everything else into a dryer. I dried most of my pack out using the hand dryer in the restroom. Once dryer (and smelling slightly of other people's hiking boots) I met up with the field course and drove out to their field camp farther into the park. We spent the next two days driving and hiking around. We saw a total of 12 grizzly bears, most of them from the road, and a lot of caribou, Dall sheep, and two moose, one of which crossed the road right in front of our van. We took a long hike up a wide, gravel river bar that took us back near a big area of very pretty volcanic rock that was slowly eroding down the side of the mountain. We also spent time roaming around picking berries - just like the bears are doing this time of year! My last full day in the park I went out on the famed park shuttle buses, found another wide gravel river bar and hiked along it. The only wildlife I saw on that hike was a Mew Gull that wanted to mooch my lunch - even in the middle of the wilderness; gulls are still game for handouts. My bird list for the whole trip wasn't very big, but I did see two new species for me - Willow Ptarmigan, and Gyrfalcon. The ptarmigan was on the road, only vaguely uneasy about the bus rumbling by, and the gyrfalcon near a nest that was pointed out to me. I've spent too much time working with bird conservation orgs to be totally comfortable with people just pointing out nesting sites ("Thou shalt not indiscriminately reveal the nesting locations of birds") but this pair did have a 30 foot cliff for protection. Probably the most interesting thing that the bus came across was a grizzly bear draped across a caribou kill that he had stolen from a local wolf pack. The bear was about 200 yards away, draped across the carcass. Better than breakfast in bed; breakfast *is* bed! The first time I saw it, there were still a few wolves hanging around the area, keeping a wary eye on the bear. Later on, someone must have informed the photographers; because on my bus ride back, there were about five guys with their giant lenses trained on the bear (by this point fast asleep), silently urging the wolves to come back and give it another go. The Mountain, Denali, was also out (i.e., not completely obscured by fog) for the day as well. I did NOT drop everything to ride all the way to Wonder Lake to take my very own picture-of-Denali-reflected-in-the-lake, but I did buy a few postcards. I'm happier with my pictures of the bears. Now that I'm back from Denali, I've had to actually start planning for the fact that I'm leaving Alaska in a little over a week. *Gasps*. I'll be back in West Virginia for about a week visiting people (Yes, Wine Shop, I will come and see you guys, so you can stop asking my mother J ...) And the next adventure is. trying to do something in the field I studied in (and also, incidentally, love as much as I do the puffins) - theatre. I'm going to be working as a sound intern for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC. I know I'm going to be in for one heck of a dose of culture shock, but I'm pretty sure this will be another interesting adventure, and it'll give me another few months to ponder and try things and figure out what I want out of life. So the puffins are migrating and so am I. Take care wherever you are, and enjoy the last few weeks of summer! Mareth |