May 2, 2005 St. Matthews Bay to Landlocked Bay Day 63
Neptune and I are getting into a new rhythm on the voyage. We go to bed late, get up not-so-early, and proceed slowly to the next fantastic anchorage where we spend the rest of the day exploring. Landlocked Bay is one of our all-time favorite anchorages. It sits in a bowl at the base of incredible mountains. Copper mountain is especially striking. It has everything a mountain should have–dozens of waterfalls plummeting thousands of feet through the air off its summits, sides too steep for snow or vegetation, blasted by ice, and has numerous overhanging cliffs. And at its base it is ringed in a thick cloak of old-growth spruce and speckled with mineshafts from the 1900’s. I climbed up one of the tailings piles and explored through the ruins of the mine. One of the shafts went way back into the mountain and branched off in several directions with rails coming out of it. But I was soon turned back due to a noxious odor that was blowing from the tunnel. It made me dizzy and weak and I quickly abandoned the mine. Next I had great fun pulling Modulus up another river lined with purple stones. These “river runs” are my new favorite afternoon activity. With great effort I was able to pull and drag the boat way back up the valley until I reached a point where a log jam blocked any further progress and my pants were soaked. Shooting the rapids and small winding channels through the tundra and muskeg was one of Modulus’s finest moments.
