HaveKidsWillTravel

Getting close enough to touch and walk on them, though, is a rare thing – and the Exit Glacier, dropping from the massive Harding icefield near Seward is the best chance we’ve had to really see a glacier up close and personal. Walking across the brittle talus of the moraine, through the cloudy meltwater streams, feeling the cold catabatic winds and touching the clear, hard ice of the glacier tongue itself brings it to life in a way that no amount of picture-postcard scenic photo-ops are ever going to.

This is what a Glacier feels like.

The cabins are booked 6 months in advance, but we found a Yurt available , and while we weren’t exactly sure what a Yurt was, we were certain it sounded better than a tent. So we booked for a couple of nights, arranged the water taxi to drop us off in Tutka bay, and started packing. I stopped to see if I could get a map of the bay from Homer visitors information, and it turned out the lady there had a cabin in the area – when I asked what she’d do for a few day’s camping in Tutka, she gave me a withering look – “Watch out for Bears!”

And according to our water taxi captain, Black bears are pretty common in the area we’re headed – but with common precautions and a bit of respect, not too much of a problem. I’m not sure how a Swiss army knife counts as a precaution, but I all of a sudden somehow feel better with one on the belt – and am starting to understand why all the locals carry rifles…

We were dropped off along with our packs, food, water and a double sea-kayak on a shingle beach in a densely forested little corner of Tutka bay – about an hour out of Homer, and a good 20 minutes past the last sign of human habitation… The Yurt was just along a trail, set about 25 meters back in the trees, and is a very practical little wilderness home – a lightweight, round structure with three daybeds around the walls and a combustion stove in the centre. Simple, pretty, dry and warm. There is a mattress on each bed, an axe for firewood, and that’s about it. Cooking is done in a firepit back down at the beach, where there is a steel cable and pulley system there for hanging your food out of reach of bears – you don’t want your porridge attracting them up to the Yurt for breakfast.

Angus and I went for a fish in the Kayak, Fiona got the fire going, and Digby and Evie had a play on the beach. With light so late, we didn’t get the kids to bed till maybe 11, and I was up fishing till maybe 1am. With the still, clear water on the Fjord, it was like fishing in an aquarium – you could watch the little fish and occasional larger one following the lure in, and I’d caught and released a few (just little 1 or 2 pound Black Cod, Rock Cod, Pollock and Irish Lord) when up popped a sea otter – right where I was casting, and just sat there watching me till I gave up and went to bed.

Next morning we all had a slow start, and Digby woke up with a bit of a cold, so Fiona snuggled up with himin front of the logfire in the yurt while I took the two big kids for a hike up a trail up to the ridgeline. Through the dense spruce down low, and then up through neck-deep thickets of raspberry, skunk weed and devils club (which is as bad as it sounds…). Angus started to get ‘a bad feeling about this’ as we came across a few fresh patches of bear scat, and after about two hours of powering straight up the trail, Evie’s little legs started to run out of puff – I had revolution on my hands just as we reached the crest of the ridge, just in time for some snacks and the hike back down again.

Back at camp, we were doing a bit of whittle craft before bed-time and discovered that a split feather, tied to the shaft of our arrows using a teabag string, turned our harmless home-made bow and arrows into weapons of mass destruction. A bit more fishing before bedtime, and a few more little fish (a bigger black cod, but threw him back too), and the sea otter, although he was a little less interested in me tonight.

Next morning Fiona woke up early and was scanning the still bay when she saw something she reckoned looked like a Beluga, so I jumped into the Kayak and went for a paddle to see what I could find. Nothing but sea otters, but I carried on across the bay and found a narrow tidal channel that ran through to a freshwater stream and meadow. Paddling up, I could see good size fish on the stream bed below (steelhead or salmon, I’m not sure) as I struggled against the stiff current.

And then, all too soon, it was time to pack up – just in time for the water taxi to take us back to Homer. And despite the dire warnings and the evidence of bears in the vicinity, they’d been happy enough to keep to themselves – and on all accounts, that’s pretty much how they are. The lady at the visitors information told me how she’d been up in the bay just a couple of days ago with her husband out in their boat, watching a family with young kids traipsing along a shoreline trail, and noticed a bear and its cubs picking at mussels just around the headland in the direction the family was headed. While they were working out whether to try and scare off the bears or warn the family, the bears sensed the intruders, and melted into the forest – just as the family rounded the headland and carried on their way, oblivious…

In fact, it turned out that we were passing right by – on the shores of Cook inlet, our way down the Kenai peninsular – on one of the lowest tides of the summer, apparently perfect time to go digging for razor clams ourselves.

We stopped at the nearest town’s supermarket, and – in a whole aisle dedicated to clamming equipment – picked up a ‘clam gun’, basically a long metal tube that apparently you plunge into the sand, cover an air hole with your thumb, pull it out and reveal the clams below.

We weren’t the only ones to have read the tide tables, though, and the Clam Gulch campground was close to capacity with eager clammers like ourselves, anticipating the morning low tide. By 10am, the air was electric as we trooped down the cliffs to the beach. This part of Alaska gets some of the biggest tides in the planet, and the sea had dropped a good 15 feet from where it was the previous afternoon – exposing a good hundred meters of muddy, sandy ocean floor.

The beach is cold and muddy, the wind biting, and the water freezing – and across the inlet stand 10,000 foot tall snowcapped volcanoes. But we’re not here to frolic in the sunshine – we’re here for some serious hunting and gathering, and with a few pointers from some locals, we got an idea of what to look for – really just little dimples in the muddy sand. The real trick, though, is to avoid the muddier bits, boot-sucking quicksand that really doesn’t want to let you go.

And sure enough, just as we were starting to figure it out, Evie fell over in the freezing, sucky mud and (mucky and damp in the cold wind), decided she was no longer having any fun. Everyone else decided their hands were going numb too, so headed back up the beach before they got hypothermia while I stuck around to make sure we had dug enough to command some respect back at the campsite.

But digging complete, the real work starts – washing and cleaning the things, and I had my work cut out making it through our catch. The foot of the clam is really the prize – a tender piece of seafood that is up there with a good scallop, the neck is kind of like a rubbery bit of calamari that is apparently best minced.

So while we can tick it off the list of quintessential Alaskan experiences – getting elbow deep in frigid mud on an open, windblown beach beneath glacier covered volcanoes in search of elusive molluscs, I would be more than happy to sell you a used clam-gun if you are in the least bit interested…