“Watch your step, the boardwalk is slick!” I called back to my group. Don’t let the word “boardwalk” evoke an image of carnival rides and arcades – Ideal Cove couldn’t be more different from Coney Island. The old-growth temperate rainforest enveloped us this morning, dim and dripping wet despite the sun’s efforts to punch through the thin stratus clouds. Stepping carefully from plank to plank, we were grateful for the netting that the U.S. Forest Service strung over the boardwalk, giving us traction in a slippery land. The giant, prehistoric leaves of devil’s club and skunk cabbage lined the trail between girthy trunks of spruce and hemlock. By the time we reached Hill Lake (where one group spotted a swimming beaver!), we’d eaten 5 kinds of wild berries: watermelon berry, five-leaved bramble, highbush cranberry, blueberry, and red huckleberry; good quick energy to power our legs back down to the beach.
We swung our muddy boots back into the inflatable boats and cruised towards the National Geographic Sea Lion, slaloming between crab-pot buoys – a prelude to our dungeness crab dinner tonight! Just before lunch, we pulled anchor and made our way north to Petersburg, an energetic Southeast Alaskan town with Norwegian history and a massive fishing fleet. Summer is the high season in a fishing town, and as we disembarked we were careful not to crowd the docks, allowing hurried fishermen to pass – hauling gear, pushing wheelbarrows, and talking on cell-phones between the carefully regulated “openings” when they return to the fishing grounds.
There was something for everyone in Petersburg: a hike through a peat bog, a “dock walk” to learn about the fishing boats, a photography tour with cameras in-hand, and an inflatable boat ride through the harbor. But some were ready to launch off on their own, finding simple pleasure walking the (few) streets of Petersburg. Later in the afternoon, 12 hungry souls joined me for a blueberry picking hike through the woods. Such abundance! Southeast Alaska in summer must be the hardest place on earth to starve. Those with longer arms pulled blueberry-laden boughs down over the trail so that the kids could pick more easily. For every blueberry dropped in the bucket, at least one went straight into our mouths – nevertheless we emerged with quite a haul: 1765 berries in the pitcher, more than any of us guessed!
A crab feast made a perfect end to a big day in Southeast Alaska. As we steam north searching for whales in the sunset, surrounded by the vastness of this wilderness, I’m reminded of little Christiana’s words as she picked blueberries today: “If you lived here, you’d have a really big back yard!”
