On the road: Kenai Fjords National Park

July 24, 2023

The Kenai Peninsula has special significance to Kris. In 1975, she spent two months

in Alaska visiting relatives, camping, and fishing on the Kenai River. She caught a king salmon on the Kenia, had it packed in dry ice, and flew home to Houston with it. Her father grilled salmon steaks

and pronounced them the most expensive salmon we ever ate. So many good memories of that

summer as we traveled around the Kenai Peninsula!

My favorite flowers were growing in passes along the roadway for miles!

The splash of a spawning salmon heading upstream next to a roadside pullout.

According to the locals, the weather has been rainy and cloudy most of the summer with only a handful of sunny days. When we arrived in Seward and stopped at the Kenai Fjords National Park Visitor Center, we learned of a guided ranger walk at the Exit Glacier part of the park (the only part accessible by road) so off we went. We were very fortunate to have good weather while up there and the ranger was excellent. While only 24 years old, her parents were both park rangers and she grew up in Seward. She related her experiences with the retreat of Exit Glacier in her lifetime as documented in annual family photos taken at the glacier. We did not hike all the way to the Harding Icefield, but did make it out to the point where the toe of the glacier was in 2005.

For several years, we have anticipated a boat cruise in Kenai Fjords NP to see whales. While the weather was miserable, the wildlife viewing was epic. The boat crew said we were fortunate to see all of the different animals we encountered in the 8 hours we were in Resurrection Bay and the Gulf of Alaska - sea otters, sea lions, many kinds of birds including two species of pufin, humpback whales, and orcas. The humpbacks in the Gulf of Alaska use a feeding technique known as "bubble netting". It is a learned, cooperative behavior not observed in other parts of the world. They only use it for a short period each summer and we witnessed it! We kept pinching each other to reassure ourselves that we were really experiencing it. Although pictures can't do justice to what we saw and the boat captain had to keep his distance by law, here are my feeble attempts at photographing what we saw.