Alaska 2008

Another gray morning, but who cares as long as it is not raining. We are having a heat wave with the temperature near 60° F. We got a little lazy this morning and lounged around until about 10:30... a first for us. We may go for a second tomorrow.

Our first stop of the day was the Pratt Museum in Homer. This little museum has some very interesting exhibits about the history, culture and nature of Kachemak Bay. We spent a couple of hours at the museum. The Pratt's collection is well known and it has lent exhibits to the Smithsonian. This morning the museum showed artifacts that were brought up yesterday from the wreck of the Sailing Bark Torrent (video) which ran aground and sank in the Cook Inlet 140 years ago today, July 15, 1868. The artifacts included portholes, cannon shells, bullets, a toilet and a small brass field artillery piece. All of the items have yet to be conserved so they were displayed in containers full of sea water.

Another exhibit at the museum is a homestead cabin where you learn how the homesteaders lived in the early to mid twentieth century. We got into a lengthy discussion with a volunteer who told us that his wife built a much larger cabin by hand and they live in during the summers. When we told him we were thinking of moving to Maine and having a log home built, that's when six degrees of separation started to play. He told us he was from Portland, Maine and still lives in Maine during the winter. I told him that our daughter went to scholl at Bowdoin College and he, in turn, told us that he was Bowdoin class of 1955 and classmate of Leon Gorman, L. L. Bean's grandson and current Chairman of L. L. Bean. We probably could have played the game longer but other people came into the cabin and he needed to attend to them.

This afternoon we drove back into Homer with the intent of walking on Bishop's Beach and look for Sea Otters, which are frequently spotted just off shore. When we got to the beach we could not see any. Walking along the beach with a relatively strong wind blowing and a temperature in the mid 50s was not too comfortable with the clothes we were wearing so we chose to get back into the truck and find some other places to explore. Hopefully, in the next couple of days we will be able to walk along the beach. We drove quite a bit of the way east of Homer into what they call "The East End." We had some great views of the the mountains across Kachemak Bay but could not find a safe place to pull over to take photographs.

The south side of Kachemak Bay is mountainous with a number of glaciers visible. These glaciers are part of an icefield that covers the southern part of the Kenai Peninsula and contains about 40 glaciers. I have taken a number of photographs from the campground of the mountains but because of the gray skies and haze, none of them will do justice to the actual scene. We are hoping that the skies will clear sufficiently over the next several days so that we can some clear shots of the mountains.

Morning on Kachemak Bay. The clouds were quite low and the morning sun was rising over the mountains.