Pacific NW

Expeditions

It has been a fantastic day. We cautiously exited treacherous and uncharted Mirror Harbor at low water slack tide. We had a beautiful partly cloudy morning and a close encounter with a giant Humpback whale. There was hardly a breath of wind as we steamed through the intricate channels, narrows, and archipelagos of Chichagof’s west coast. It is a truly awesome place with jagged horn peaks, abandoned gold mines and Indian villages, and salmon leaping everywhere. Slipping into Klag Bay a thick school of salmon swam under the boat, and a fierce-looking pod of sea-lions hunted them nearby. Sea otters, river otters, and seals are also swimming about the bay, and the salmon are everywhere! You will see one leaping on the water anywhere you look. The chart indicated the abandoned town of Chichagof at the head of the bay, an old gold-mining town that pulled $13 million in gold from the mountains. We could see a few buildings from the water, but nothing else was written about the place. Our expedition into the lost city of Chichagof proved fantastic and beyond our wildest expectations! Picking our way through the dense woods and rocky beaches, we discovered a vast boom-town going to rot and returning to the earth. We found endless houses, construction equipment, huge steel machinery and tramway tracks leading everywhere. Everything in the whole town is just sitting there, decaying into the thick layer of moss on the rainforest floor. We even found an old piano in the ground. There was a huge workshed built of enormous timbers and still of sound structure. Saw blades, radiators, and old wooden crates lay about. The crown jewel of our expedition was the discovery that one of the mine shafts goes extremely deep into the mountain. We screamed into the recesses of the tunnel in order to make ourselves known to bears. A long, hollow echo returned, sounding into infinity. The mineshaft was crooked as a lightening bolt which made for hair-raising progress as we made our way around each blind corner. A ways in we encountered water on the floor of unknown depth and had to halt further exploration of the mineshaft. We turned off our flashlights and experienced absolute blackness and the echoing sounds of dripping water from the stalagtites above. My flashlight battery was going dead so we headed back out into the world above ground. There was a strange moment as we stepped out into the hot afternoon air and blinked into the sun. We plan on returning tomorrow with extra batteries, ropes, lifejackets, radios, and spotlights. I cooked up a couple of heaping plates of spinach, rice, onions, bamboo and garlic with peanut-coconut sauce. We ate it with cashews and limes and just stuffed ourselves. After a successful day of exploration we needed the hardy meal. Justin caught a silver salmon after dinner but it leapt out of his net. He is extremely frustrated because he caught the salmon within 15 minutes, and then didn’t get another bite for several hours.