Cold As Ice

Towards the end of each trip I take, there comes an inevitable "taking stock" moment, an in-process assessment of how great the current trip has been and how I might best remember my experiences. Usually that moment includes a decision about how many blog posts each vacation is worth and a mental sequencing of those blog posts. After the last landing on our Alaska cruise, and knowing that I'd be for sure writing a post about my pending visit to Denali National Park, I decided Alaska would get three blog posts and that would be it. Not very many for a trip of over a week in length but it would be what it was. 

The very next day, we sailed (using that term loosely) past the Hubbard Glacier. Now there's a fourth (and last) Alaska post.

It feels weird to be writing what I'm about to write but in a way, I was sort of no stranger to glaciers by the time I reached Hubbard. In December of 2013, I spent the better part of an Icelandic winter day walking on one. Then the day before I laid eyes on Hubbard, I'd spent all too short a time gazing at the Mendenhall Glacier just north of Alaska's capital of Juneau. But what I saw from the boat on that Thursday early morning blew Iceland and Mendenhall away. By a lot.

I remember two things pretty vividly from my 2013 glacier walk. First, our guide describing the glaciers as entities in motion and not just solid blocks of ice sitting in one location. Second, the incredibly beautiful and otherworldly blue color of the ice. If you are a Game of Thrones fan, think the color of blue on the white walkers. It's a perfect match to the hues in a glacier. Visiting Hubbard reinforced what I remember from December 2013 so clearly.

Small icebergs dotting the sea on the approach to the Hubbard Glacier.

I awoke on Thursday morning, August 17 in my cruise ship bed with great anticipation. Finally there was something to see from the boat itself. If my first ocean cruise experience taught me anything, it was that your vacation sort of gets put on hold once you get back on the ship. That day of sailing was about to be different, at least for a few hours. There's no way I could have had the same experience on land that I was about to see from the sea.

Stepping out onto the balcony of our room that morning was cold but not overly so. Not like I needed a heavy jacket or anything. But scattered about the sea were a few icebergs. Yes, icebergs! The water was so cold that chunks of ice were not melting in the water. I'm not talking Titanic sinkers or anything here but looking down at that milky green salt water I could imagine it was close to freezing. As we headed further and further north, we picked up more and more icebergs around us.

Perhaps a little background about glaciers is in order? These things are essentially giant slow-moving freshwater frozen rivers that flow downhill based on their own weight. Along the way they erode the surface of the land by picking up chunks of rocks and flowing those down to wherever the glacier happens to end. I could tell some of the icebergs around our boat had broken off from Hubbard because I could see pretty good sized chunks of rock embedded in some of them. Yep, I was on a boat watching rocks on top of ice floating by. Pretty wild!

The Hubbard Glacier is approximately 76 miles long from beginning to end. If that seems like a long way, it is but not so much really by glacier standards. Glaciers cover approximately 10% of the Earth's land and the world's largest glacier, Lambert Glacier in Antarctica, is 60 miles wide and 270 miles long. Having just poo-pooed the size of Hubbard, it still takes the ice in the glacier approximately 400 years to travel the full 76 miles. That meant that the ice we saw at the edge of the glacier had been added to the flow in the second decade of the 1600s.

Close up look at the face of Hubbard Glacier.

While I'm speculating about just how gorgeous the entire 76 miles of the Hubbard Glacier might be, the face of the glacier where the ice met the sea was spectacularly beautiful. Glaciers are blue for two reasons: (1) they lack air bubbles which generally causes ice to look white and (2) water molecules absorb colors of the spectrum other than blue much more efficiently that they absorb blue. This is the same reason why large bodies of water often appear to be a bluish color.

The variations of blue in the face of Hubbard are amazing and you can see the layers of ice that have formed on top of one another and the debris the glacier has carried with it throughout the four centuries it has flowed to the ocean. Look at the pure white snow on the mountains in the distance to understand just how blue the palest of pale blues are. It also has these incredible vertical cracks splitting the horizontal layers. The amount of pressure the ice must have been under to make those kinds of cracks must be immense.

When we finally got as close as we could get, we were staring at a wall of ice probably (and I'm guessing here because there was nothing really to give it any sort of scale) about 50 feet high. In some spots it was barely clinging on to itself where the horizontal strata clearly showed some signs that it looked to be collapsing into the ocean.

A portion of the glacier collapsing into the sea.

And indeed sitting and watching that's exactly what happened. In the hour or so we sat on the boat close to the glacier, piece after piece fell into the ocean to be reclaimed by the sea and let more of the ice behind get ready to do the same. If you had asked me what I expected the face of a glacier to look like, I would have thought it tapered into the land or sea at its end. The view of pieces breaking off a sheer wall was unexpected but likely way more impressive than an edge tapering to nothing and slowly drip-melting into the sea.

This sounds stupid but standing and watching, it was obvious the glacier was moving. Not so much by the fact that some of it was actually collapsing into the water but by the sounds you could hear. Glacier watching is very much an aural experience as well as a visual one. The sounds we were hearing were described as "white thunder": creaking, squeaking sounds caused by the ice compressing itself and moving and cracking under its own weight before releasing the pressure and moving again. Between these creaking sounds, every so often there were sounds that I imagine are just what an avalanche sounds like: slowly building rushing sounds like a lot of fine powder is descending from a great height.

Admittedly, watching a glacier is not too exciting and staying out on our balcony and later on deck for a time that lasted maybe two and a half hours total I didn't see a whole lot happen. But it's not like I will ever see this much again in the future. I don't have too many cold weather destinations on my list and I certainly don't have a lot of boat rides planned in those places that get that cold. Spending a small portion of one morning in my life watching this was worth it. And a total unexpected surprise for a time when I expected my vacation to go back on hold. Watching this wall of blue ice and hearing it move and tear and splinter against the backdrop of Alaska's mountains was a good morning.

The Hubbard Glacier from afar with the cold cold sea in front and the massive mountains behind.

Totem Poles

A long time ago, Raven and his two slaves built a camp at the mouth of a river. Towards the end of the year, they went out fishing to stock up for the winter but could catch nothing to keep them fed through the cold months. One day a woman appeared to them out of the fog that had set in that day. Neither raven nor his slaves saw her approach. She knew they were hungry so she asked raven for his hat, which she then turned upside down and out of the fog in the hat drew some salmon. These were the first salmon ever created.

Raven took the woman back to his camp and married her and she produced salmon for him and his slaves every day. Eventually raven started to take his wife for granted and became critical of her. In a moment of anger one day, he argued with her and hit her and she fled from him. He followed and tried to grab her but each time he closed his arms they went right through her, like she was made of fog. She ran until she reached the water and then kept going into the sea where she disappeared and took the salmon with her.

There are variations of the story of fog woman up and down the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Canada and Alaska. In some versions, fog woman is a chief's daughter who grants raven the right to marry. The story explains the origin of the salmon that are a critical part of the diet for peoples who have lived in that area of the world. Every spring when the fog returns to the land from the ocean, it is fog woman returning along with the salmon who start making their way upstream to their traditional spawning grounds.

Fog woman with salmon. Raven sits above her; the two slaves are below. Totem Bight State Park, Ketchikan.

When I was a kid growing up in England, I played with toy cowboys and toy indians. I'm not placing any value judgment on that activity; I'm just stating it as a fact. Back in the 1970s in England, I was fascinated by America and that for sure included the old west. I loved watching western themed shows and movies on the limited television we could get back then. At some point I'm sure I couldn't get enough of cowboys and indians.

Among the sheriffs and braves and outlaws and chiefs in my toy collection, there was a totem pole, something I probably at that time assumed was placed in the middle of every native American camp back in the 1800s or whenever I imagined the battles between these two sides were happening. I am fairly positive that the toys I owned as a kid were intended to depict the native Americans that lived on the plains of the central United States, nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples who lived in tepees. I believe this because I know I owned a toy tepee for my toy indians (I promise that will be the last time I use that term) to stand outside and fight off the cowboys.

Sometimes it takes a while for you to erase the beliefs you held as a child. Over the past almost four decades I've lived in this country I've been to a number of former or current native American communities, mostly the pueblo cultures in the American southwest. Not once did I ever see a totem pole in any of the places I visited. I wasn't particularly looking for them but they for sure weren't there. They never existed. Not in that part of the country. My toys were wrong.

In the last 40 years, I didn't question the toys I played with as a child because I probably just wasn't thinking about whether totem poles were carved by the Sioux or the Zuni or the Iroquois or whomever else I supposed I was playing with back then. Now I have. It took a trip to Vancouver and Alaska to make me think of this again. The reason my toys were wrong is simple: the native Americans who carved totem poles weren't on the great plains or the deserts of the southwest or the forests of New England. They were in the Pacific northwest. And that's the only place you can find true totem poles in their original locations today or at any other time.

Salish Grandparents and Grandchildren Gateway, Stanley Park, Vancouver.

Among the First Nations peoples, the carving of totem poles was a practice limited to six native American groups: the Chinook, Coast Salish, Bella Coola, Haida, Tsimshian and Tlingit. The range covered by these peoples stretched from present day southern Oregon or maybe northern California in the south all the way north to just above the top of the Alaska panhandle. I've listed the tribes in order from south to north in this paragraph. 

These people didn't live in tepees like the toys I owned in England; they lived in long wooden communal houses called plank houses which held about 40-50 people or so, usually associated with a single clan. In the center of these houses was typically a fire pit around which the family would gather on cold nights. A village would be comprised of a number of these plank houses. Their lifestyles and living habits were shaped by the geography and climate where they lived. It was cold in winter which required sturdy dwellings that could be heated in winter. And cedar, a most durable wood building material, was plentiful for building these houses. 

In front of their plank houses, you would frequently find a totem pole. In some cases the house itself might have a totem pole integrated into the construction and maybe used to hold the roof of the house aloft or denote the entrance to the dwelling. Or sometimes the poles would be shared in between houses or erected in a village for a festival. 

I admit I am fascinated by totem poles, so a trip up the Canadian and Alaskan coast had to include a visit or two or three to see different types of poles in the area of the world that they were first invented. Before I set off for the beginning of our trip in Vancouver, Canada, I admired these things as works of art. On a basic level these poles are composed of graphically striking and brightly colored animal and human figures stacked on top of one another (not really stacked, but carved out of a single tree to resemble that). On a deeper level they must have some sort of symbology to them. I was determined to find out more by the time I disembarked from our boat at the end of our journey.

Seven totem poles at Brockton Point. Stanley Park, Vancouver.

Our totem pole journey started in Stanley Park, a large green space just to the northwest of downtown Vancouver. Towards the eastern tip of the park, known as Brockton Point, there is a collection of a dozen or so totem poles and gateways of various origins, or more accurately, carved in a few different styles. Totem poles don't last forever, so the poles in Stanley Park are not works from a hundred or more years ago but are instead either copies of earlier poles or original works in the style of a particular tribe. If you are staying in downtown Vancouver, Brockton point is a good 45 to 60 minute walk depending on where you are staying, but it's an easy flat stroll and totally worth the effort.

Most of the poles in this location have a plaque explaining its origin or style, what exactly is carved and the meaning of each different symbol or animal or figure. In reading each plaque and studying each totem pole, we started to notice similar images on more than one pole: ravens, eagles, thunderbirds, halibut, killer whales (or orca), bears, wolves, beavers and frogs. In addition to the birds, fish and mammals that are indigenous to the area, there are human figures: tribal chiefs; or symbols of men or women or children; or figures from mythology of the region like fog woman.

Each pole generally tells a story, whether it's of a particular tale with a plot like the story of raven and fog woman or the history of the family or individual who commissioned the pole or in whose honor it was carved and erected. Families were usually associated with particular animals and in some cases the members of the family believed they were descended from the wolf or the bear or the raven or some other creature. It would all be laid out in the totem pole.

Three totem poles at the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary, Ketchikan. Spot the octopus, beaver and snow crab.

Stanley Park is a great place to start a journey to learn about all these symbols because there are a significant number of poles of different origins and functions together in one spot. There are modern and ancient poles. There are poles that were self supporting and those which held up part of a plank house. There are also special purpose poles, like a mortuary pole which held the remains of a great chief. You can appreciate the breadth of meaning of both the poles and the individual characters on each pole.

From Vancouver, you might want to head north to Ketchikan, Alaska (we did!) which is located on Revillagigedo Island several hundred miles to the north of Vancouver. A drive will take you about 25 hours or so. The best way to get there may be by boat or plane. When you arrive you will find an area which boasts more totem poles than any other spot in the world. 

Totem poles are seemingly everywhere around Ketchikan. Take your pick of wandering around downtown and looking at the few located in that area (including the totem pole from the page numbered 25 in the U.S. passport) or spending time at the Totem Heritage Center about a half a mile northeast of town or one of the couple of parks located on the Island dedicated to totem poles. There are buses running through Ketchikan and to the north and south so all these spots are accessible via public transportation for free (in the downtown area) or a couple of bucks each way (if you are headed further afield).

We opted to head north on the Silver Line bus for 40 minutes or so to Totem Bight State Park, a spot on the west coast of the Island with a walking trail and 14 poles of Haida or Tlingit origin or tradition as well as a replica of a Tlingit clan house or plank house, which gave us an opportunity to understand the places where the carvers and their families traditionally lived.

Tlingit clan house with a totem pole serving as the front entrance. The pole in the foreground shows a halibut and otter.

As a second major stop on a totem pole pilgrimage, Totem Bight was fantastic. The couple of days separation from Vancouver along with maybe a little reading on the subject picked up at the Legends of the Moon gift store in Stanley Park gave us a little time to process what we had learned from our first stop. We were able to spot eagles and orca and beavers pretty easily in the poles. We were even able to pick out fog woman in one of the poles, identifiable by the salmon she held in each hand.

So what do these things all mean? Well as you might expect, the different animals typically have multiple meanings. The eagle is a symbol of peace or friendship. The raven is a trickster capable of help or harm but is also a symbol of the creator. The orca or blackfish is a symbol of the sea and strength. The appearance of these creatures in totem poles either tells parts of a story or symbolize characteristics or origin stories of the families who commissioned them.

The walking loop at Totem Bight is a leisurely maybe hour long stroll, leaving enough time to study the poles, check out the clan house (entered through a hole in the front totem) and look out over the water and shoreline for maybe some bear or orca (we didn't see any). There are different types of imagery at Totem Bight from that we found at Stanley Park in Vancouver. We saw the devil fish (or octopus) in one of the poles and in another found a man wearing a brimmed hat, which was traditionally worn at occasions where stories were told. The more you see of these things, the more you can appreciate the depth of meaning and connections to the past.

One thing we didn't expect to see on our trip to Ketchikan was the actual carving of a totem pole, but here we were wrong. 

The first thing we did when we got to Ketchikan was head south to the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary where we planned on spending a couple of hours trying to spot black bears and bald eagles fishing for salmon in the stream running through the property. In addition to getting some amazing looks at these animals and a family of river otters, we found the workshop of Wayne Hewson, a Tsimshian who has been carving totem poles for almost 20 years.

Admittedly, not a whole lot got done in the 15 minutes or so we watched Wayne work but you could get a sense of how much work goes into these things and just how big the single cedar trees they are working with are. There were clearly some non-traditional images in the pole he was working on the day we were there, including some very large mosquitoes which we had heard before we set foot in the state referred to tongue-in-cheek as the state bird of Alaska, which caused a good deal of concern to us about the size of these insects (we saw pretty much zero mosquitoes in our almost week in state).

If I was fascinated and curious about totem poles before I went on this trip, I remain more so now that I've scratched the surface just a little bit on what these carved poles mean and have meant to the people who carved them. What before to me were pretty striking works of art now have a depth of meaning that I didn't understand before setting foot in Stanley Park earlier last month.

I have been buying knick-knacks or tchotchkes or whatever you want to call them wherever I've been in this going on five year journey. Right behind three small alien figures (from Roswell, NM) and a model of Hohensalzburg Fortress (from, you guessed it, Salzburg, Austria) sits a very small totem pole with a raven figure sitting atop a beaver (the protector, by the way). Like all the other items on my desk that I've accumulated over the last 50 or so months, my tiny totem pole is a reminder of where I've been, specifically my time in Vancouver and Alaska. It is also a symbol of how travel has enriched my knowledge of our planet's history. 

Ketchikan was one of the two best days we spent on this trip (along with our full day in Denali National Park) and one of the big reasons for the fond memories of that day is our stops at the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary and Totem Bight State Park learning about and deciphering totem poles. I can't imagine I'm setting foot in Alaska any time soon again. Don't get me wrong, it's on the list somewhere but there's a ton of stuff ahead of it including like three California trips. If I do ever get back there, Saxman Totem Village and the Totem Heritage Center in Ketchikan are way high up on my list.

Thunderbird, Stanley Park, Vancouver.