Alaska weather really found us today. Our trip leader’s morning wake up call included “it’s 49 degrees with a steady rain”, and that was the story of the day. At home we’d have said” let’s wait and hike tomorrow” but on vacation you have to do what you can do- so off we went on a three hour bushwhacking walk through the forests and bogs of Ushk Bay.
Our group of eight started off with a vertical climb through brambles to a boggy plateau. The bog was largely carpeted in moss and heathers. If you pick up a piece of the moss you can squeeze water out of it. The bog had many small pools that looked fairly shallow, but probing with a hiking pole showed them to be at least 3-6 feet deep! The bog also had many different wildflowers, orchids and water lilies. On the way back down, we snacked on wild blueberries while scrambling through their branches. We also had to work around dense areas of Devils Club, a tall plant with nasty thorns on the stems and the undersides of leaves. A salve from Devils Club is sold in Alaska as a remedy for arthritis.
The lower section was a drier forest including alders as well as spruce and hemlock. The scat of bear and deer were everywhere we walked today, but we made enough noise that the animals never appeared.
The final section of the hike crossed a soggy meadow. As with our other landings this week, Ushk Bay has large tidal swings— we saw evidence of this in the stranded jellyfish well into the meadows.
The fog closed in as the ship navigated through narrow straits en route to Sitka tomorrow morning.
Pictured: the ship in the gloom, the group climbing through the undergrowth, water lilies in the rain, the undergrowth following the group.
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