Alaska …In The Wake Of Its History Retracing The Route Of A Railroad Tycoon Who Explored Prince William Sound A Century Ago
Our cruise ship chugged confidently across the drowned morainal bar, gliding into the secret fjord. It was a rare perfect August day in south-central Alaska. Standing on the breezy top deck, I paid binocular homage to the crevasse-riven glaciers — Surprise, Stairway, Serpentine — that seemed to hurtle headlong into the sea, and to the savage, ice-shagged mountains — Muir, Gannett, Gilbert, Curtis, Coville — soaring in unbroken thrusts as high as 10,000 feet out of the glassy fjord.
Over the ship’s PA system, Kristin announced, “When they came through here, the gap between Point Doran and the Barry Glacier was about as wide as this boat.”
Allowing for the usual tour-guide hyperbole, that 1899 plunge into the hidden fjord was nonetheless a deed of nautical daring.
“They” were the members of the Harriman Alaska Expedition (H.A.E.), who a century ago this summer made the Anglo-American discovery of what was to become known as Harriman Fjord, the most spectacular piece of marine real estate in all of Prince William Sound.
The mountains I stood admiring had been named by later travelers after the stalwarts of Edward H. Harriman’s “floating university” — as its leader called the collection of scientists, artists and writers he had invited aboard the George W. Elder for a two-month cruise along the southern coast of Alaska.
During our one-day cruise, our ship motored half the length of Harriman Fjord and parked just off the snout of Surprise Glacier so tourist cameras might catch the drama of a skyscraper of rotten ice calving 250 feet into the blue sound. The safety of our massive, steel-hulled vessel, bobbing in the genial sunshine, insulated us from the raw glory of the frozen landscape Harriman had discovered. Lenses trained on the creaking glacier, we passengers became like spectators at a car race waiting impatiently for a six-car pileup.
The sense of wonder that eluded our calving vigil had overwhelmed the H.A.E. As the Elder steamed up Port Wells into the Barry Arm that July day a century ago, the ship’s captain told Harriman that the navigable waters ended at Barry Glacier, which, before its retreat from 1898 to 1914, blocked the way into the fjord. But Harriman spotted a narrow gap between headland and glacier and ordered the ship onward.
“Full speed, sir?” inquired the dubious captain. “Yes, full speed ahead.” Gazing at the shimmer of sea beyond, Harriman added, “We shall discover a new Northwest Passage.”
The Elder burst across the shallow, rocky bar into the unknown sound. “The sail up this majestic fjord in the evening sunshine,” wrote John Muir, “…was, I think, the most exciting experience of the whole trip.”
And what a trip it was. In the last decade of the 19th century, Harriman had made his millions nursing the Union Pacific Railroad to boisterous health while all but wrecking his own in the process. When his doctor ordered a rest cure, instead of heading off for the beaches of Hawaii, Harriman chartered his floating university.
No exploring expedition in American history ever fielded such an all-star cast. Aboard the Elder that June and July were John Muir and John Burroughs, the two leading nature writers of their time; the young photographer Edward S. Curtis, soon to launch his life’s work capturing vanishing Indian cultures, but as yet making ends meet shooting society weddings in Seattle; the great ethnographer and natural historian George Bird Grinnell; Henry Gannett, the leading geographer of his day; the gifted bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes; Alaskan scientific pioneer William H. Dall (for whom the Dall sheep is named); artist and writer Frederick Dellenbaugh, who had run the Colorado River with John Wesley Powell in 1871; 20 other pre-eminent scientists and artists; and, not least, 8-year-old Averell Harriman, Edward’s son, destined to become ambassador to the Soviet Union in the mid-‘40s and governor of New York in the late ‘50s.
Edward Harriman aimed at a monumental scientific and exploring mission. The team would eventually publish 11 stout volumes of findings, but two months was too short a span for breakthrough research. Making frequent shore leaves, the expedition’s savants gathered and bought every “specimen” in sight, from birds’ eggs to totem poles, turning the cruise into a collecting orgy. A secondary purpose, cooked up in Harriman’s ambitious brain, was to scout the way for a tunnel under the Bering Strait, the key link in an eventual around-the-world railroad line.
In the end, the H.A.E.’s cardinal achievement was the discovery of Harriman Fjord.
Last July, with photographer Irene Spector, I spent a week in Prince William Sound retracing this germinal jaunt, as well as cruising, hiking and sea-kayaking to my heart’s content. Irene and I were lucky enough to share that journey with writer Nancy Lord, who was finishing work on a deft meditation on the H.A.E., “Green Alaska: Dreams From the Far Coast” (Counterpoint Press).
Steeped as she is in Harriman lore, Nancy’s insight was a bracing tonic to Kristin’s cutesy PA patter. As we floated past a congress of sea otters lolling indolently on their backs, Nancy observed: “In their whole voyage, the H.A.E. never saw a live otter - they were that close to extinction. Edward Harriman bought a single pelt from a native for $500, which was a fortune then.”
Even today, Prince William Sound is remote wilderness; only a handful of fishing ports cling to its shores. We chose to make Whittier the base for our week there. You cannot drive to the town, but every morning a train from Anchorage pokes along the tidal rips of Turnagain Arm, slowing to view Dall sheep, then bores through a series of tunnels under Portage Pass to emerge on the western fringe of Prince William Sound.
Nearly all visitors hook up with one-day cruises, then return to Anchorage that evening. We took the cruise our first day, but then chose to hang out long enough to begin to know the place.
By all measures, Whittier is the strangest town in Alaska. Planned during World War II as an emergency all-season port in case the Japanese bombed Anchorage, it is dominated by two gigantic Army barracks. The Buckner Building, derelict today, once housed 1,700 GIs and their families, along with such midwinter necessities as a pair of rifle ranges and three bowling alleys. In the 14-story Begich Towers (the tallest building in Alaska when it was built in 1952), fully half the town’s 250 permanent residents live today in a concrete blockhouse straight out of some Soviet Five-Year Plan.
Only in The Triangle, an eccentric scatter of shops and cafes along the waterfront, do you glimpse in embryo the seaside resort that will doubtless blossom as soon as the road from Anchorage (projected for April 2000) breaches Portage Pass. Here we passed our downtime, browsing through Log Cabin Gifts, with its live reindeer, Elizabeth, installed in a Scandinavian manger next door; or dining at sunset on halibut and fries on the back patio of Varly’s Swiftwater Seafood; or fondling sleek fiberglass boats outside the Alaska Sea Kayakers A-frame office.
Funky though Whittier may be, it makes an ideal gateway to Prince William Sound’s limitless recreational possibilities. During our week, we accomplished four half-day hikes out of town. The easiest was a stroll to the crest of Portage Pass, 800 feet above the sea, two miles west of the railroad tunnel’s mouth. This low saddle has served as a vital bridge for centuries, for it offers the only easy passage from Cook Inlet to Prince William Sound. (To connect these two vast bodies of water by boat requires an excursion of more than 300 miles.) The Chugach Eskimo crossed Portage Pass long before the first white man saw Alaska. Later, Russian traders and American prospectors swarmed across this handy col.
Our most exhilarating hike threaded tundra benches and talus piles, past a ribbon waterfall spilling off a shale precipice, up to the snout of the Lernard Glacier. There we beheld a primal agony of nature: a torrent of ice water thundered out of a cave that gaped in the glacier’s blue facade, while boulders, loosed by wind and sun, plunged off a 100-foot ice cliff above the cave to shatter in the streambed, splashing us with spray. I realized that I was watching up close a glacier in the not-so-subtle throes of geologic retreat.
One hundred years ago, despite their professional diligence, the members of the H.A.E. had made sure they had their own rollicking good time along the Alaska coast. The George W. Elder was equipped with every luxury imaginable, from the cases of champagne that the passengers poured into long-stemmed crystal to toast one another each night, to a derrick that hoisted aboard the grizzly that Harriman shot on Kodiak Island.
The scholars of the floating university divvied themselves into 12 committees, including the Committee on Big Game and the Committee on Music and Entertainment. The scientists took turns ponderously flirting with the four attractive young women in the Harriman entourage. The literateurs on board wrote doggerel about the expedition that they read out loud after dinner, and, like some college football cheerleading squad, the expedition adopted a team chant:
“Who are we? Who are we? We are, we are, the H.A.E.!”
Despite the presence on board of a world-class collection of egos, these empyrean thinkers seemed to get along remarkably well. The curds of nascent conflict were diluted in a soup of raillery and jibe. Muir and Burroughs were longtime friends, but no two more different souls could have found themselves walking the Elder’s decks. For Muir, who had explored Alaskan glaciers on bold solo treks 20 years before, the vast expanses sang anthems of joy. But Burroughs, who had never before been west of the Mississippi, was constantly cold and homesick for the garden-sized epiphanies of his beloved Catskills.
Near Ketchikan, Burroughs had delighted in a fiery sunset that Muir missed. When his crony came on deck, Burroughs needled him that “you ought to have been out here 15 minutes ago instead of singing hymns in the cabin.” Muir rejoined, “Aye, and you, Burroughs, ought to have been up here three years ago instead of slumbering down there on the Hudson.”
For Nancy, Irene and me, the apogee of our week’s sport came during a two-day sea-kayak jaunt out of Whittier, along the south shore of Passage Canal. We beached for lunch beside a salmon spawning stream where we watched old, rotting humpies flailing upstream to lay their eggs and die. We poked in and out of coves, paddling through floating tangles of kelp.
Late the first afternoon, we rounded Decision Point and set up camp on a neck of land with a picture-window view of the open water of Port Wells, up which the Elder had steamed to make its great discovery in Barry Arm. Hunkered around a smoldering fire of birch and spruce, we stayed up past our bedtimes, and, in the words of the old Greek poem, “tired the sun with talking as we sent him down the sky.”
The next day, on our way back to Whittier, we took a detour into the head of Shotgun Cove. As we neared the shore, a pair of beach-combing black bears, startled by our silent, gliding advent, gave us a wary once-over before lumbering into the forest. We tied off our kayaks and headed up through trackless woods to climb to the height of land. “Hey, bear! We’re coming through!” one of us would call out every few moments. There were ripe berries everywhere: blueberries, thimbleberries, salmonberries, crowberries. We sampled them till our mouths were smeared with juice.
An hour later, 800 feet up, we crested a mossy cliff and stared out over Blackstone Bay. A whole new galaxy of glaciers surged and twisted toward the horizon. In all that vast immensity of ice, rock and water, I fancied, not another human being moved.
Lounging on the soft tundra that cushioned our ledge, we were transported back to 1899. As we basked in the warm sun of our fourth straight cloudless day, we tasted the heady optimism of the H.A.E., and it seemed possible once more to believe that here, with the fjords and glaciers reaching to infinity, there really were new worlds to discover.
IF YOU GO Until the highway goes through Portage Pass in 2000, the only reasonable way to get to Whittier is by the Alaska Railroad out of Anchorage or from a parking lot on the west side of the pass. Call the Alaska Railroad ((800) 544-0552) for schedule and rates. In summer, Phillips’ Cruises offers a daily 26 Glacier Cruise out of Whittier for $119 per person ((800) 544-0529). No hotels in Whittier live up to the standards of those in Anchorage or Fairbanks, but the best of an indifferent lot is June’s Vacation Condo Suites, funky B&B rooms refurbished inside the bizarre ex-military skyscraper called Begich Towers; Call (907) 472-2396, or write to P.O. Box 715, Whittier, AK 99693. Alaska Sea Kayakers, in The Triangle, rents fiberglass kayaks (rates vary, but average $45 a day) and runs guided tours of Prince William Sound. Call (907) 472-2534 in summer; (800) 746-5753 the rest of the year. Our favorite restaurant in Whittier was Varly’s Swiftwater Seafood, also in The Triangle, with a back porch open to the setting sun. A walking map of the area, a small pamphlet called Whittier, Alaska: An Enigma in the Wilderness (probably the only history ever compiled of Alaska’s strangest town), and other information can be obtained from the Whittier Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 607, Whittier, AK 99693.