Day-by-day look at Alaska

We were close enough to hear the two cubs growling as they fought over a salmon that Mom brought to them. 

After about an hour at the falls, we headed down the bay to another falls, where we watched a black bear meandering along the shore. He walked past the falls for a great photo op.

The guide showed us an outhouse on the shore near a popular salmon fishing spot. It had been tipped over  and destroyed by grizzlies. He said that brown bears are like human 2-year-olds. They put everything in  their mouth to explore it and get into all kinds of mischief. He said that a young male bear played with the toilet seat for some time, making it slap and clap. We saw such a young male grizzly, possibly the bear of toilet-seat fame, exploring a line of rowboats cached on a lonely shore by a fishing party. The bear chewed some of the wood on the seat of a rowboat, but didn’t find it tasty enough to wreck the boat.

We motored back to the first waterfall, where mom and cubs were now catching salmon galore in the falls, ripping off the skin and gulping it down. We got some amazing pictures. In all, we saw four brown bears and four black bears on our boat trip, plus a bald eagle at its nest.

Lunch at the Redoubt Bay Lodge was wonderfully delicious: tomato Florentine soup and a savory hot pastry with the texture of a bread pudding, loaded with chopped vegetables and drizzled with a hot goat cheese and red bell pepper sauce. The water was interesting, which generally isn’t a good quality in water. Since this is true bush lodge, they generate their own electricity, use old-fashioned wooden outhouses with quarter moon cutouts on the doors and purify their own water from glacial runoff. (By the way, bush in Alaska means no road access.) We were surprised to see streams in Alaska that were as milky blue as the eyes of a husky.

This is from “glacier flour,” which is incredibly fine-grained granitic silt. Even though the lodge’s water was filtered, the purification process didn’t take out all of the silt. The water was loaded with suspended fine particles, and was a faint milky blue. However, it tasted great and caused us no ill effects.

The rain from yesterday fell as snow in the mountains, and the peaks behind the lodge were freshly dusted with the first snow of the season. Mind you, this is the first week in August.