September 18: First snow in the mountains.
September 21: First frost along the lake.
First Snow, Chignik Lake
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Tag Archives: Alaska
Where all the Raspberries are as Big as Your Thumb
“Pick me! Pick me!”
Anyone who knows Jack knows that he is a fisherman through and through. Moving to a village where the salmon are running so thick we can see them finning up the river and into the lake is beyond Jack’s wildest expectations. This is not his dream. This is our reality. He’s spent time every day walking the shore, sometimes with fishing rod in hand, other times just watching and listening to the music of river current and salmon jumping, splashing, sloshing their way upstream.
And so it’s understandable that it was left to me to spot the patch of raspberries Jack had walked right past on his way to the river. And such raspberries! The patch isn’t large, but this has been an exceptional year for berries and the vines are heavy with tart, sweet, jem-like fruit.
And with green berries still growing in more shaded parts of the patch, we should be able to pick all we need. Jam, pies, syrups, fresh with morning cereal… How about a raspberry-chipotle sauce to go with fresh-caught salmon?
“Bigger than store-bought,” as Jack says. Tastier, too. I don’t know about them being as big as your thumb, but they’re the biggest we’ve ever seen. Can you believe he was so intent on the salmon that he walked right past the whole patch without even noticing?!
Nervous Water and Red Salmon
Looked out the window this morning and saw nervous water on the lake. Skipped breakfast. Three hens and a buck. I’ll cure eggs for ikura later today. Shioyaki salmon for dinner tonight. Beginning of our second week in Chignik Lake, Alaska.
Big, Beautiful Grizz Chillin’ at the Edge of an Alaskan Forest
We caught this Alaskan grizzly bear chillin’ on the edge of a forest on a cool, overcast morning in mid-summer. With nails like that, who wouldn’t lie around admiring them? (Six more photos.)
The previous day, I (yours truly, Jack Donachy) managed to drop and break “the big lens.” But this sleepy guy barely paid us any attention as we photographed him from the safety of our Chevy, so the 70-200 mm with a 1.4 teleconverter got us close enough. Hard to say how many cars had driven by this big, blonde-brown hulk without noticing that morning. We stayed with him – and he with us – for about half an hour.
He’d doze off for a bit, wake up, think about whether or not to get up (or maybe he was trying to remember where he’d left his car keys last night), give a little sigh and then drop off to sleep again.
And then he’d wake and take a look around.
Eventually a scent on the air caught his attention…
And he ambled off. Almost looks like he’s posed in a diorama. The overcast morning light really made the colors pop.
Artists of the North Pacific Seas: The Watercolors of Dall’s Porpoises
You might see a plume of ocean spray, a glimpse of black and white and if you’re close enough, you’ll hear a burst of expelled air as one of the speedsters of the sea comes up for a breath. Playing in the boat’s wake, Dall’s porpoises create ephemeral pieces of art out of seawater, light and air.
Water & Light Mohawk. Dall’s porpoises are capable of keeping pace with boats cruising at over 30 mph (55 kph), a speed that places them with or perhaps slightly ahead of Orcas and Pilot Whales as the sea’s fastest cetaceans.
Folded Glass. In Alaska’s seas, a steady diet of herring and other small fish help keep the population robust. Males, which attain larger sizes than females, can grow to a length of about eight feet and attain weights just under 500 pounds.
Black and Silver. Typically traveling in pairs or in packs up to a dozen or so animals, tell-tale water spouts in the distance are a sign that the porpoises are in the area. If their stomachs are full and the speed of the boat is just right, they may come zipping across the water to play.
Watercolor Brush. Dall’s porpoises can seem to appear out of nowhere, and before long they disappear again.
Farewell Waterburst. Currently, populations of Dall’s porpoises are doing well. They prefer to swim over deep (500 feet), cold water along the continental shelves ranging from southern Japan, as far north as the Bering Sea, and along the west coast of America as far south as Southern California. As a species, they would benefit from international cooperation to conserve the fish stocks they rely on for food and to ensure that they are not accidentally caught in fishing nets.
A Whale of a Tour: Cruising Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park
In what seemed to be sheer exuberance, this humpback whale heaved himself out of the sea again and again, the perfectly executed cannonballs sending up enormous showers. From eagles to orcas and sow bears with cubs to mountain goats with kids, a recent cruise of the Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward presented opportunities to photograph a number of Alaska’s wildlife stars.
Last summer while salmon fishing aboard our C-Dory Angler, Gillie, we found ourselves suddenly quite close to three massive, bubble feeding, lunging humpback whales – the largest humpbacks we’ve seen to date. The whales and the salmon were drawn to the same thing: acres of herring so dense they were causing our boat’s sonar to misinterpret the vast school as seafloor. Between netting bright silver salmon for our daughter who was visiting from California, navigating the boat and snapping photos of the feeding leviathans we were kept on our toes. At one point the whales surfaced so close to our boat we could smell their breath. It was a bit unnerving.
One moment the seas would be calm, the gulls and kittiwakes resting on the water with just a few sentinels circling about. Suddenly the birds aloft would cry out, signaling the sitting birds to take wing… and then these three massive whales would erupt from the sea. If you look closely, you can see a panicked herring barely escaping the gaping jaws of the center whale.
That evening when we uploaded our photos, we were disappointed to find that the best of our whale shots were marred by the presence of a tour boat in the background. And then it hit us – why not see if the tour company would be interested in the pictures? That’s how we came into possession of tickets for Major Marine Tour’s all-day Kenai Fjords National Park nature cruise, complete with and an all-you-can-eat Alaskan salmon and prime rib lunch. Having now experienced three of these tours, we give them the highest possible recommendation for anyone interested in the wildlife and natural history of coastal Alaska.
Eagles are common along the shoreline of the fjords, and we never tire of admiring them. Not above scavenging, these opportunistic birds will prey on salmon, other fish, seabirds and even baby mountain goats.
This past Monday we used four of our tickets to book ourselves and friends visiting from Montana on a tour on the Spirit of Adventure – the very boat we’d photographed the previous summer. A few brief sprinkles of rain aside, it was a beautiful day, and since it was a lightly-booked weekday cruise we had plenty of room at our dining table as well as at the ship’s rails when we were viewing glaciers and wildlife.
Both horned puffins (above) and tufted puffins nest in the cliffs above the fjords.
The feathery “horns” above their eyes give horned puffins their name. This one, fresh from a dive in search of small fish, popped up right next to the boat.
Certain places in the Kenai Fjords are important breeding grounds for Stellar’s sea lions. In recent years, their population has fallen into decline and although human overfishing may be the culprit, no definitive cause has been identified.
Seep (or common) monkeyflower adorns the cliff walls of this black-legged kittiwake rookery. We didn’t spot any eggs, but the nests look complete and ready for this year’s broods.
Meanwhile dense rafts of dozens or even hundreds of thick billed murres gather along current seams that push baitfish into tight schools where they become easy pickings.
Reminiscent of the Tasmanian Devil of Warner Brother’s cartoon fame, Dall’s porpoises can appear at any time, zipping across the sea in plumes of spray in pursuit of the fish they feed on or just a good bow wake to play in. They are reportedly capable of speeds of around 35 miles per hour (55 kilometers). On this day, the porpoises were in a playful mood and the captain hit the boat speed just right. For several minutes half-a-dozen of these sleek speedsters zig-zagged across our bow.
Although wildlife is a major draw on these cruises, the fjords are equally famous for spectacular tidewater glaciers. Above, Holegate Glacier sloughs off tons of ice at a time in thunderous cascades. Note the seagull at the upper right of the photo.
When the crew scooped up a pristine chunk of glacial ice in a net and announced that Glacial Ice Margaritas were being served, we couldn’t resist. The ice – which is hundreds to thousands of years old depending on which part of the glacier it comes from – is super dense, hard, clear and cold.
Near Aialik Glacier, dozens of harbor seals were hauled out on the ice along with quite a few sea otters such as the one in the foreground above. The National Park Ranger providing commentary aboard Spirit of Adventure remarked that prior to the Russian hunting of sea otters (which, by the early 20th century had nearly driven them to extinction) it was common to see sea otters hauled out on land.
Throughout the seven-and-a-half hour cruise we kept a keen eye for orcas. The day had already been amazing – truly one for the books: leaping salmon, a sow black bear with cubs in a clearing on a mountainside, a nanny mountain goat with her young kid just above the high tide line, whales, porpoises, and a dozen or so species of sea birds all had checks next to them.
Toward the very end of the cruise, as we were nearing Seward, the pair in the above photo showed up. Kenai Fjords NP is home to three distinct types of these cetaceans: resident, transient and offshore. The three types have different diets: residents are salmon and fish eaters, transients focus on mammals such as seals and sea lions, and offshore orcas are known to hunt sharks and baleen whales. The three varieties also have different languages and DNA tests indicate that they do not interbreed. This pair – the male in back with the longer, more angular dorsal fin, the female in front with a shorter, more rounded dorsal fin – may be transient orcas.
Even before the cruise begins there are wildlife viewing opportunities right in the harbor. This sleepy otter filled up on mussels he pulled from pilings before conking out for an after breakfast snooze.
Cowboy Soup – The Day After Wagon Wheel Ribs
The leftover stock from oven-cooked Wagon Wheel Baby Back Ribs is the base for one of the best soups we’ve ever enjoyed.
This soup doesn’t really have much to do with cowboys, except that if we were cowboys, this would be what we’d want to eat around the campfire. A cold night, wolves howling in the darkness, shooting stars above, a roaring fire cracking and sparking, a properly chilled Riesling… (We’re the kinds of cowboys who pack stemware.)
Cowboy Soup
Ingredients
- 2 cups leftover liquid from Wagon Wheel Ribs
- 1 pound leftover baby back ribs, meat cut from bone and sliced into bite-sized chunks
- leftover bones, cracked
- leftover potatoes, beans and onions
- fresh sweet corn from one or two cobs (1 – 2 cups)
- 1 cup smoked gouda cheese, shredded
- bay leaf
- additional potatoes, cut into large chunks, salted and seasoned as desired
- additional spices and seasonings such as chili powder, jerk rub, Cholula sauce, Mongolian fire oil, oregano, mesquite seasoning, salt and pepper, as desired
- sour cream
Directions
- Place leftover ingredients from Wagon Wheel Ribs (liquid, meat, bones, potatoes, beans, onions) and bay leaf in a medium-sized pot and heat over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Simmer.
- Meanwhile, place olive oil in a skillet and heat over medium heat. Add chunks of additional potatoes, seasoned as desired with salt, pepper, Cholula sauce and jerk rub. Cook till tender.
- Add potatoes to soup. Stir in sweet corn and gouda cheese. Add additional seasonings if desired.
- Serve piping hot with a dollop of sour cream.
Wagon Wheel Baby Back Ribs
Look Ma, no grill! Seasoned just right and slow cooked in the oven in a large pan along with potatoes and onions, these baby back ribs come out sweet, spicy, tangy and falling off the bone. See recipe below.
Oftentimes camp cooking proves to be the mother of invention. On a rainy, windy evening in Seward, outdoor grilling was out of the picture. But our appetites were already set on baby back ribs…
This one-pan method for baby back ribs is sure to be a crowd pleaser and is as close to no-fuss cooking as you can get. Cleanup’s a breeze, too. We use a 12.5″ Swiss Diamond pan – our wagon wheel – for this kind of cooking. It’s heavy, oven-safe and non-stick. Mirin, a very sweet rice wine used liberally in Japanese cooking, gives this dish a pleasant sweetness complementing the heat.
Wagon Wheel Ribs
Ingredients
- 1 set baby back ribs, cut into individual-sized servings of 2 to 4 ribs each
- a few small potatoes, some cut into large chunks, others left whole
- 1 large sweet onion, chopped coarse
- 2 cups black beans, already cooked
- 4 cloves garlic, chopped coarse
- mirin (or substitute a little sherry and honey)
- olive oil
- Cholula sauce
- Mongolian fire oil
- mesquite seasoning (optional)
- a chili-based dry rub with some heat such as Jamaican jerk rub or any rub featuring powdered chili, oregano, cinnamon and similar seasonings
- sea salt
- freshly cracked pepper
Directions
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. (The oven in our camper only goes down to 300 degrees. You can cook these ribs more slowly and at a lower temperature if you prefer.)
- Rub plenty of the dry chili-based rub into each set of ribs. Set aside.
- Place roughly equal portions of mirin, Cholula sauce and olive oil in a large, oven-safe frying pan (one that has a lid) and mix together over low heat. Stir in a little Mongolia fire oil or similarly spicy oil. Stir in mesquite seasoning, salt and pepper. There should be enough liquid to amply cover the bottom of the pan.
- Add the ribs to the pan, turning each piece so that they are coated with liquid. Place meat side down, cover the pan with a lid and place in the oven. Cook for 30 minutes.
- Remove the pan from the oven. Turn the ribs over so that they are bone side down. Add garlic, onions, potatoes and beans. Cover the pan and return to the oven. Cook for an additional hour.
- Test the meat and potatoes with a fork for tenderness. Meat should easily come off the bone. (Save the liquid for delicious Cowboy Soup.)
A dry or semi-dry Riesling is an ideal wine to pair with spicy pork ribs.
Sweet and Sustainable: Alaska Prawns and Shrimp (and a Great Place to Find Them)
Zaru soba (Japanese buckwheat noodles) topped with Thai-seasoned Alaska spot prawns makes a perfect summertime meal. See recipe below.
The windshield has a crack running through it, there’s a little rust and a dent or two on the body, and some of the paint is chipping off the hand-lettered sign affixed to the vehicle’s side, but we look for Patrick Johnson’s little black truck every summer when we’re cruising around Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and we hit the brakes when we find it. If we don’t happen across his truck, we go find him at his Shrimp Guys Seafoods shop in Soldotna. Patrick sells sashimi-grade seafood smelling as fresh and briny as the seas it comes from.
Maybe it’s my East Coast upbringing, but experience has taught that fancy shops with glitzy signage are usually not the best places to look for quality seafood. The first time we saw the above sign, which is attached to Patrick’s older model black pickup truck, it took me back to days in the Carolinas where small-time operations were hands down the best places to pick up fresh blue crabs, white shrimp, oysters and maybe a flounder to enjoy with a bottle of something white and dry for the evening meal.
Alaska’s prized spot prawns, ready to be peeled, seasoned and treated every so briefly and gently with heat.
There are two secrets to great seafood: cook it while it’s fresh, and don’t cook it long. If seafood smells bad, it is. That “bad” smell is not seafood; it’s bacteria growing on seafood. A quality seafood shop (or the seafood counter in a well-run grocery store) will smell pleasantly of the ocean – a little briny, vaguely sweet.
As to cooking shrimp or prawns, a former mentor in South Carolina gave me advice that applies to everything from broiled salmon to fried summer fluke. He was showing me how to prepare the white shrimp I’d caught in a cast net and iced earlier that day. (Read in a slow, South Carolina drawl.) Jack, a little butter, a little lemon and a little garlic – that’s all they want. And a minute-and-a-half in the pan. Remember, they’ll keep cooking after you’ve removed them from heat, so a minute-and-a-half really means you’re cooking them for two minutes. But get them off the heat before two minutes, or you’ll ruin them. 
Smaller than spot prawns, these Alaska side stripe shrimp have the soft texture and signature sweetness of the ama-ebi served by sushi chefs. They are excellent served raw and dipped in soy sauce with a hint of wasabi. Any leftovers make a superb omelet or open-faced shrimp melt sandwich.
Zaru Soba with Thai Seasoned Spot Prawns (serves two)
Ingredients (This recipe is a snap to make with pre-made seasoning and dipping sauce.)
- soba (Japanese-style buckwheat noodles)
- 6 spot prawns, peeled, vein removed and cut open butterfly style along their length. Give them a squirt of lime or lemon and set aside.
- 2 tbsp coconut oil (or olive oil)
- Spicy Thai-style seasoning mix, or mix your own from powdered chili peppers, powdered garlic, cinnamon, nutmeg and sesame seeds
- green onions, sliced thin
- English cucumber, cut julienne – about 1 1/2 inch of cucumber per serving
- nori (dried seaweed) cut into thin strips
- wasabi
- mentsuyu – chilled dipping sauce – available at Asian grocers or in the Asian section of most regular grocery stores. Or make your own from soy sauce, mirin, sake and bonito flakes.
Directions
- Use a bowl to coat prawns in seasoning and let stand.
- Boil soba according to maker’s directions. Rinse thoroughly in cold water and drain.
- Mix mentsuyu with cold water, according to maker’s directions. Mix in wasabi to taste and add a few slices of green onions.
- Heat coconut oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add seasoned prawns. Use tongs to turn so that both sides are cooked – about 90 seconds total. Place on a plate to stop cooking.
- Place cold, drained soba noodles on two plates. Add prawns. Garnish with cucumber, onions and nori. Serve with individual side bowls of cold mentsuyu dipping sauce.
Enjoy this dish with a chilled bottle of Bianchello – a beautiful white wine from Central Italy that seems to have been created for light seafood dishes.
For sashimi grade seafood, contact Patrick Johnson at 907-394-4201 or email him at akjohnson98@gmail.com. You can find his shop at 44526 Sterling Highway, Soldotna, Alaska
Resurrection Bay Wildlife, a C-Dory Angler Tour: Sea Lions, Mountain Goats and More
With a mighty roar this young bull sea lion bellows out that this rock in Resurrection Bay near Seward, Alaska is his rock. Nestled between snow-capped mountains and hosting an abundance of otters, porpoises, seals and sea lions, sea birds by the tens of thousands and with whales almost a given, the bay offers lots to look at.
A morning filled with sunshine, calm seas and friends visiting from out of town were inspiration to take our C-Dory out for a lap around Resurrection Bay.
Sea otters like this curious spy-hopper are abundant along the shoreline. Meanwhile, scan the mountainsides on the east side of the bay for puffy white balls; put binoculars on them and they might become mountain goats.
A pair of juvenile sea lions were swimming in the harbor near our boat as we made ready, and almost as soon as we cleared the marina a harbor porpoise arced near our boat. Bald eagles chirped and spiraled in the blue sky overhead, terns and kittiwakes dive-bombed for small fish, and several cormorants, including a crested cormorant, were drying their wings on the remnants of a pier after a morning of fishing. 
Horned puffins are among the tens of thousands of seabirds that nest in the rocky mountainsides surrounding Resurrection Bay. 
No cruise is complete without encountering the whales that call the outer parts of the bay and the nearby Alaska Gulf home. This sounding humpback appeared to be feeding on herring. 
There’s sometimes a fine line between love and aggression. At one point, the smaller sea lion appeared to have its mouth entirely inside the larger one’s. After some barking back and forth and a little more bared-teeth interplay, the larger animal slid into the ice water – perhaps to forage.
Approaching Cape Resurrection by boat, you can smell the rookery well before your eyes pick out individual birds on the whitewashed cliffs. Here, thousands upon thousands of black legged kittiwakes jockey for position as they haphazardly construct precariously perched nests.
Dense rafts of murres rest near current seams that disorient small fish – the murres’ prey. At times, acres of herring can be seen just below the surface of Resurrection Bay’s waters.
Thick-Billed Murres are so common it can be easy to forget what amazing birds they are. Somewhat stubby-looking on land, they can achieve flight speeds of 75 miles an hour. In water, they transform into sleek acrobats, capable of dives to over 300 feet deep – the length of a football field.
A pair of tufted puffins, golden sunlight illuminating their eponymous feathers, glide through the waters of Resurrection Bay in search of small fish.
Whether life takes you to coastal Alaska or some other shore, we can’t recommend a boat tour of inshore and nearshore waters highly enough. In Seward, local tour boat companies offer daily cruises captained by experienced National Park Service rangers – a not-to-be-missed experience.
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