Road Trip Reports

Alaska :  Part II – Anchorage
By Jimmy Woodard  

Jimmy Woodard and Nealand Hill

Our flight from St. Paul arrived in Anchorage about 8:00 PM on Friday, May 27.  Since the Nome portion of the trip didn’t start until the 29th, we had reserved a rental car for the four of us:  Todd Pepper and Brian Self, our Canadian birding friends for both trips, and Nealand Hill and me.  

We drove to our nearby hotel, the coastal Inn , and checked in, then had dinner in the hotel bar.  Two more new friends from the trip, Charley Marbut and Bill Bertrand, joined us for a few beers afterward.  

Saturday morning the four of us left Anchorage at 4:45 AM , for a two-hour drive down to Seward for a scheduled pelagic trip on Mariah Tours.  The drive was very beautiful, but it began to rain as we got to Seward at 7:00 AM .  

We had breakfast, then walked over to the tour office to check in by 8:00 AM .  The captain arrived at 8:30 , and after a quick safety lecture, we boarded, along with two guys from New York and a couple from Australia .

This trip was scheduled to be an eight-hour tour of several islands, fiords and glaciers.  The captain advised us that the chances of getting out of Resurrection Bay were marginal, due to inclement weather out in the ocean.  

Outside the harbor we saw several sea otters.  Birds were scarce, but we did see several pairs of Marbled Murrelets and had a brief look at a pair of Kittzlitz’s Murrelets, a lifer for all four of us.   

As we headed south to the end of the bay, the fog and rain made viewing conditions difficult, but we had a few glimpses of the snow-capped mountain ranges on either side of the bay.  We also had a few peeks at a couple of glaciers, too.

The wind picked up and the sea got rougher and the swells reached ten feet.  The non-birders in the group looked “green around the gills” and mostly hung out in the cabin fighting seasickness.  

The captain decided it was too rough to venture outside the bay into the ocean, so we turned around.  He herded us all into the cabin as we made a rough dash across the mouth of the bay to the leeward side to calmer waters.  We saw a few shearwaters knifing through the wave troughs before we got to the calmer water.  

We took a leisurely pace back to the harbor.  The captain nosed the boat into a few coves and alongside some cliffs where seabirds were nesting in small numbers.  We saw cormorants, gulls, kittiwakes and a few puffins and murres.  We also enjoyed several Steller’s Sea Lions on some rocks and one female Mountain Goat on a rocky slope.  

The boat arrived back in Steward Harbor about 1:00 PM , so our all-day trip was shortened to about four and a half hours.  We had fun, but were a little disappointed that we were unable to make the full tour of the glaciers and islands.

We made several birding stops on the way back to Anchorage from Seward.  We found Townsend’s Warbler, Hermit Thrush, Fox Sparrow, Varied Thrush, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Trumpeter Swan, Bald Eagle, Boreal Chickadee, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Tree Swallow, Wilson’s Warbler, Pine Siskin and Northwestern Crow (a lifer for Nealand).  

The clouds lifted and the rain stopped, allowing us great views of the spectacular scenery along the way.  The slopes of the mountains were lush with green vegetation and the streams were sated with snowmelt.  

Near Anchorage we stopped at Potter Marsh and walked the boardwalk.  A female moose walked through the parking lot and gave us a close encounter as she walked under the boardwalk.  People were running from everywhere to take pictures.  

We returned to our motel about 7:00 PM .  We ate dinner at the Snow Goose restaurant in downtown Anchorage .  I had an excellent tasting rockfish meal.  Afterward, we did laundry until 11:00 PM .  

On Sunday we slept in until 7:30 AM !  We ate breakfast and went to the store before returning the rental car across the street.  We all repacked so we could leave extra bags at the hotel while we traveled to Nome .  We went to the airport at noon for an early check-in, then returned to the hotel for lunch and to check out.  

We returned to the airport and killed time until we flew out at 5:30 .  We made a stop at Kotzebul above the Arctic circle to refuel and take on passengers.  We left about 7:30 PM and arrived in Nome at 8:45 .  

We checked into the Aurora Inn , which has to be the nicest place to stay in town.  We ate a late dinner at Nilano’s, a Japanese-Italian pizza place.  It was good.  This would be where we would have dinner almost every evening while we were in Nome .  When we went to bed after 11:00 PM , the sun was still brightly shining.  Our dreams this night would be of many more birding adventures that awaited us the next five days in Nome .