Kenai Fjords National Park

Saturday July 19

The Kenai Fjords National Park was established in 1980. It protects the Harding Ice Field (one of four remaining ice fields in North America) and the rugged coastline where tidewater glaciers meet the sea. The intersection of the tidal waters, the kelp fields (protected from sea urchin depredation by sea otters) and the deep waters of the Gulf of Alaska creates nutrient rich waters. These in turn attract fish and the eaters of fish. 

We spent the day on a private boat trip in and around the fjords. We saw a lot of small salmon fishing vessels, and a lot of fish eating marine mammals— orcas, humpbacks, harbor seals and stellar sea lions. We also saw fish eating birds —- several members of the auk, gull, and cormorant families, and bald eagles. 

We began our boat trip with a sighting of three mountain goats (a male and a female with her kid), rare to see and even rarer to see only about 50 feet above the water. 

It was wonderful to see humpbacks and orcas…. but we did more than just “see” them.  The two times we saw orcas, they surfaced multiple times and included young ones as well as a couple of the bull males. We even saw a young one breach. It’s not certain whether there were two different pods or not. 

And the humpbacks— we saw the same group of about a dozen on two different occasions Both times we saw them bubble-net feeding. This is a rare cooperative feeding behavior for what are basically solitary animals. It is a behavior that only occurs in a few places for a few weeks of each year, and only includes a fraction of the population of humpbacks each summer in Alaska. We were lucky enough to witness it last summer outside Juneau. To see it again, and from a smaller boat so that our vantage point was much closer to the sea surface, was wonderful. We knew when the whales were about to surface because gulls would start circling in a rather frenzied motion. It was fun to watch the seabirds swarm in to get any fish that escaped the whales. 

We got to see both kinds of puffins (horned and tufted) that live in Alaska. We also got to Rhinoceros Auklets (new for us) and Common Murre, which can dive to 600 feet in search of fish. 

We ate lunch while watching the Holgate glacier “calve” into the Holgate Arm (fjord). What a day!

Pictured: mountain goat, orca with baby, orca “spy hopping”, humpbacks feeding, harbor seals, Holgate glacier calving, tufted puffin, horned puffin