Following the path of a historic journey

From July 21 to Aug. 21, the M/V Clipper Odyssey sailed along the Alaska coastline from Prince Rupert, British Columbia, to Nome, retracing the route of the Harriman Expedition of 1899. On board during both expeditions were artists, writers, scientists, and photographers. During the expedition retraced this summer, four Alaskan high school students were on board, including Colony High School graduate Clare Baldwin, who kept an expedition log. This is the second installment from that log, and other installments will appear in upcoming editions of the Frontiersman.

Aug. 6, 2001 CE

M/V Clipper Odyssey, cabin 302

Kodiak and Triplet Islands

12:59 a.m.

Melissa Wockley, the teacher from Massachusetts, knocked on our door a little after 6 this morning, asking us to meet three Kodiak students in the library. Jocelyn, whose dad is head of a Native corporation, just graduated from high school and will head to Western Washington University in Bellingham in about a month; Hanna, whose dad is head of the Kodiak Historical Society, will enter fifth grade in the fall; Matt, whose dad is the Alaska Department of Fish & Game bear biologist for the Kodiak area, will enter 11th grade in the fall.

After a quick breakfast and introduction to an additional 10 Kodiak residents who would spend the day with us, everyone boarded Zodiacs for a cruise around the Triplet Islands.

All of the students, including the three from Kodiak, got into Sergey Frolov's Zodiac. Sergey is from the Siberian Peninsula and is currently working on a photo book about Russia's Kuril Islands.

Because Sergey is a photographer, he tends to get closer to wildlife than some of the other Zodiac drivers.

We cruised right into the kelp beds beside the islands, and floated with a sea otter with a pup resting on her stomach. A few minutes later, we cruised right under cliff-nesting cormorants, gulls, and puffins.

Matt's dad, Larry Van Daele, pulled up a piece of kelp to show us the shrimp, crab, and other marine invertebrates entangled in its roots. Larry told us his wife makes kelp pickles -- I tried some raw; it was extremely salty.

We brought the kelp back to the ship and Dale Chorman, a naturalist from Homer, cut it into a kelp horn.

To play it you buzz your lips like you would to play a trumpet. The tightness of your cheeks determines the pitch.

My lips were covered in a sticky white residue after playing.

After lunch, I discussed my project with my mentor and on-board scholar, Richard Nelson. Part of the idea in having Alaskan students on board the Expedition was that they would choose an area that interested them, develop a project, and mentor with one of the scholars.

My project had to do with economics and conservation related to fur seals in the Pribilof Islands. I asked to mentor with Richard because he is very good at working with all kinds of people, has a lot of experience with issues that involve both economics and conservation, and is a great writer.

We worked on an outline of what I wanted to accomplish, talked about the kinds of questions I would need to ask, and who I should talk to. Right before we disembarked in Kodiak, I showed him the kelp horn. He loved it -- apparently he carries a digeridoo wherever he goes!

In Kodiak, Debbie, Natashia, and I met up with Jordan. Jordan gave us the digital camera, then set up the GPS transponder e-mail software on board the ship. The Marine Exchange of Alaska is using the Harriman Expedition to test a satellite transponder that transmits the ship's latitude and longitude via satellite every few hours, and can also send and receive e-mail.

The transponder we have will track our location on a Web site. I guess the hope is that by transmitting a ship's location, these transponders will simplify rescues.

We had about four hours ashore. Matt, Natashia, Debbie, and I wandered around the Alutiiq Museum, and Matt's dad's office to check out the various skulls and skins he had.

There was a welcome reception at the National Fishery Research Center on New Island with Alutiiq dancers and Russian balalaika players. Also, at the center, was a columnar marine tank and a touch pond where I cradled a sea cucumber and hermit crab.

We returned to the ship for dinner, but so many guests had been invited on board, there wasn't enough space in the dining room. Megan, Elizabeth, Matt, Julia, Jordan, Camilla, and I ate in the day lounge.

Aug. 7, 2001 CE

M/V Clipper Odyssey, cabin 302

Geographic Harbor, Katmai National Park and Preserve

12:35 a.m.

We arrived in Geographic Harbor mid-morning, and quickly got everyone into Zodiacs to go bear hunting. Debbie, Natashia, the Rockefeller girls, a couple of passengers, and I went with Kim Heacox, the Expedition photographer.

Kim and his wife, Melanie, were backcountry rangers in Katmai National Park and Preserve during the summer of 1985. He pointed out the cabin they stayed in as we cruised by.

The first bear we found was young -- probably 2 or 3 years old.

We followed it along the shoreline, until another young bear wandered out of the trees and met up with the first one.

They mirrored each other's motions, about 50 yards apart, then drew together, reared up on their hind legs and batted at each other. They separated after a few seconds, and continued along the beach.

The first bear stepped into the water, concentrated for a few moments, made a swift motion with its right shoulder and paw, then clambered out with a starry flounder. The second bear hovered, and seemed to be jealous.

Further along the beach we found a mother and two cubs. The other Zodiacs reported she had been nursing; we saw her leading her cubs along the beach, all of their legs moving in synchrony.

The final two bears we saw were on an island, and were very dark in color. They were foraging along very light-colored algae at the edge of the water, and the contrast was beautiful.

Earlier Zodiacs had seen them trying to mate (out of season), so we knew that they were a young male and female. When they reached a small peninsula at the end of the island, they walked their dark, bulky bodies along the skyline, then swam across to the mainland, 20 yards in front of us.

When Kim noticed I was taking photos, he was really excited. He reminded me of a little kid as he crouched down on the floor of the Zodiac next to me and whisper-squealed, "Yes! Wait, wait . . . oh, oh, get him, Clare, he's on the skyline. Did you get him? Did you get him? That was so beautiful!"

When we got back to the ship, he ate lunch with Natashia and me.

I really like Kim. He's unassuming . . . I guess he's a real naturalist in the sense that he learns everything he can about a subject, then tries to convey that knowledge in a way that interests his companions. He told me that Katmai National Park was created in 1917 after the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, and that Geographic Harbor honors the National Geographic Society.

After lunch, Kris Crossen gave a lecture called, "Geology of the Aleutian Chain: Volcanology and Plate Tectonics on the Pacific Rim." Apparently there are 200 Aleutian islands spread across 1,500 miles, and 10 percent of the world's active volcanoes are in Alaska. In Katmai, volcanic activity is caused by subduction of the Pacific and Continental plates, six to eight centimeters a year.

After Kris' lecture, everyone boarded Zodiacs to visit an anthropological site on a nearby island that one of the scholars, Aron Crowell, knew of.

Allison Eberhard, Natashia, and I hauled gear for Larry and Steph while they filmed interviews with scholars Paul Alaback, Bill Cronon, Kathy Frost, and Aron Crowell.

From the top of a bluff, inhabited around 1600 CE, we watched Camilla, Elizabeth, Megan, and Allison Sayer go swimming.

Back on the ship, everyone met in the lounge for a recap. Aron did a quick presentation on how concentrations of resources correlated with Native settlements in Geographic Harbor. David Rockefeller asked if there were regime shifts and changes in commercial harvest, how could we know that the concentrations of resources we measured today were the same as when the Natives settled?

Aron replied that David was right, it was shaky, but the areas that showed the greatest diversity of resources today probably had a similar diversity before.

Aug. 8, 2001 CE

M/V Clipper Odyssey, cabin 302

Semidi Islands & Chignik Harbor

6:07 p.m.

We took an early Zodiac trip around the kittiwake, cormorant, puffin, and murre rookeries on Aghiyuk Island, disembarking before 6:30 a.m.

Natashia and I were in the same boat as the film crew, which was interviewing Vivian Mendenhall.

There were hundreds of thousands of birds on the cliffs around Aghiyuk Island, and the smell was overwhelming -- musty and feral. It was also very noisy.

There was a constant ruffling of feathers, squawking, waves against the rocks . . . If Larry decides to include Vivian's interview in the final movie, there will be a really strong sense of place.

In one of the tiny cliff-ensconced bays we pulled into, I saw two bird carcasses with rended breasts on the rocks below a kittiwake colony. I wonder if they were chicks that fell?

After returning to the ship for breakfast, we cruised around Kak Island. The main attraction was supposed to be the sea lions hauled out on the rocks, but I was more fascinated with the rocks.

They were narrow, vertical columns of basalt packed tightly together like carrot sticks. They were a lot taller than the ship, and a woman beside me described them as julienned.

Before lunch, Vivian Mendenhall gave a lecture called, "Alaska's Marine Birds: How to tell a Murre from a Kittiwake."

She used slides to describe basic identification, and talked about the natural history of a number of sea birds.

Red-legged kittiwakes, which look like small gulls with red legs, only breed in five colonies and all of them are in the Bering Sea; petrels, which are nocturnal, are so sensitive to light they avoid moonlit nights; jaegers eat seafood in the winter and mice and other land critters in the summer; tufted puffins lose their tufts and the colorful part of their beaks in the fall and grow new ones in the spring; crested auklets nest in talus and fly in a scarf-like formation; albatross live 30-40 years; terns migrate 22,000 miles each year; when people began fox farming in the Aleutians, it was devastating to the sea bird colonies.

The Young Explorer's Team -- Megan, Elizabeth, Devon, Debbie, Melissa, Natashia, and I invited scholar Bob Peck to lunch. What a story-teller! He works for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, interpreting scientists' work in a readable way for magazines like Audubon and National Wildlife.

To do this, he travels to field sites to work with the scientists and get a sense of their research.

He told us about spending time with ornithologists in South American head-hunting territory when a contract was put out on their heads by Natives who thought they were searching for gold. Bob and crew ditched their first camp, ate their hummingbird specimens, grubs, and monkey hands and feet as they snuck through the forest and across a rope bridge over a ravine to a white village, then home.

At our request, Bob also explained how human heads are shrunken. It's exactly like removing the shell from a hard-boiled egg without breaking the membrane, he said, except in the case of a human skull, the membrane surrounds the skull. The skull is pulverized and fished out, then the skin is packed with hot sand to dehydrate and shrink.

We arrived in Chignik in early afternoon. I toured the Norquest Salmon Cannery with the film crew. It was noisy in the cannery, so Larry and Steph used small, battery-operated microphones pinned directly to the people they were interviewing.

I'd never been into a cannery before, so I was fascinated. What hit me the most was the efficiency of it all: hundreds of thousands of salmon coming through the cannery to be disassembled and divested of everything that makes them salmon, to become headless, gutless pallets of meat.

I wasn't grossed out, just surprised. The tour lasted about an hour, and the fish kept coming, steadily, on the conveyor belt.

At the end of the tour, we walked into an enormous concrete refrigerator packed with boxes of salmon, several stories high.

After the tour, I went with Diane, Larry, and Allison Eberhard to get cream cheese-filled doughnuts at the Chignik bakery, then wandered down the beach to visit with David Policansky -- who was fly fishing and had already caught two Dolly Varden -- and Dale Chorman.

David was fishing near the mouth of a stream and pointed out the dark bodies of several salmon swimming up it. Dale had just returned from a hike, and told me about some of the birds he'd seen.

Before dinner, there was a recap. Bill Cronon noted that Alaska has a colonial economy, where most major business ventures, like the Norquest Salmon Cannery, are conceptualized, financed, and run by an out-of-state company.

Clare Baldwin is a freshman at Stanford University. She is a 2001 graduate of Colony High School, and a former Frontiersman intern.