After 6 straight days of working at the lodge, I finally got my first two days off! I was able to find another employee, Yuri from West Virginia/North Carolina, who had the same days off and was heading to Seward to do some hiking. Since that’s exactly what I wanted to do, we hitched a ride together and had an amazing wilderness experience. It started with a lesson or two in hitchhiking. For example, Yuri had made a sign on cardboard that said “Seward” on one side and “Hope” on the other, the two towns located respectively south and north of us at Summit Lake Lodge. We held this up (in addition to our thumbs) for the direction we were trying to travel, which I’m told enhances the chance of being picked up because drivers like knowing that you have a destination in mind. We meandered backwards down the road from the lodge, holding up the sign whenever south-bound traffic came by, and about 15-20 minutes later, a van pulled over and let us in. It turned out to be a Backroads van- a multi-sport adventure touring company- with three trip leaders heading to their next assignment. The two women had ties to North Carolina and the guy had gone to Yale! Two of them were first-year leaders, just back from their first assignment leading bicycle tours in France and Italy. The third had worked for the company for three years already, all over the globe.

They dropped us off just outside of Seward, and Yuri and I walked into town, a few blocks with hotels, tourist shops and information, a bakery, and a long series of docks on the water featuring a place to photograph your catch of the day, a large fish-cleaning station, and a backdrop of mountains on the other side of Resurrection Bay. After a cup of coffee and a piece of rhubarb pie, we headed to a grocery store to get some food for our camping trip. Then, we walked up the road a couple of miles looking for the Lost Lake trail turnoff. Up another mile or so of gravel road, we reached the start of a very well maintained, forested trail, which wound upward along a stream through thick brush and tall trees. This lush and closed-in wooded area lasted several miles until we reached an elevation where the growth became lower and the vistas ever wider. We continued along a relatively flat path for some time enjoying views both to the East and West, as well as progressively better sightlines down the valley behind us. Occasionally we would catch a glimpse of the river, now far below us, or a narrow water fall cascading down a rocky ravine. The mountains to the East became taller and more snow-covered and yet our local terrain remained extremely green and friendly. As the trees died out, we came to a meadow of grasses and flowers and continued our journey through a much more open landscape, which put me at ease of the bears. I had found a flat rock at the beginning of the hike, which I held loosely in my left hand along with my Smith College reunion Nalgene water bottle. The rock would tap against the top of the bottle each time I took a step, making a noise very similar to that of a cowbell, which I thought was loud enough to warn any wildlife of our approach without being obnoxious to us. The only other person we passed during the entire 8+ mile journey to Lost Lake was a mountain biker with his dog going for a ride after work.

By the time we had left Summit Lake Lodge to go on this journey, it had gotten to be about 2pm, so by the time we actually started off from the trailhead, it was already 7 o’clock in the evening. We arrived at the lake about 10pm with plenty light left to pitch Yuri’s tent and forage for dry Spruce branches to make a fire with. It was very overcast however, and a thick fog rolled in behind us, sitting low in the valley and blowing over the lake. There was just one other tent on the south side of the main lake, and I spotted three more clustered together on a perch overlooking a secondary lake nearby, but in the area where we chose to make camp, we were the only humans in sight. We ate a quick dinner and stashed our extra food a ways away from the tent, then built our campfire and spent an hour or so feeding it the small branches we had collected while swatting away any particularly daring mosquitoes. Overnight it rained on and off, and in the morning (I had noticed light from about 3am on), it proved a difficult task to dress and extract myself from the low 2-person tent without brushing condensed water off the surface onto my head and clothing. The mosquitoes seemed even worse in the morning, so we hurriedly broke camp and mobilized for our return hike, eating in motion to keep the bugs at bay as much as possible. I had bug-sprayed the rim of my pants, sleeves and hat the night before but found that it didn’t help too much. After several painful bites on my exposed forehead and hands (thumb, palm and middle finger!) I doused myself in Off for the remainder of our descent. The return trip was very similar to our ascent but in reverse topographic order, and again we had no run-ins with any bear or moose along the way (thank god!)

We came out on the north side of the one-way trek at the Primrose Campground, a lovely site on large Lake Kenai. We walked a couple of miles around the south end of the lake to reach the highway and quickly picked up a north-bound ride from a Hawaiian UPS driver who was on vacation here visiting his parents who had retired to Alaska (though still spend winters in Oahu.) A quick stop in Moose Pass (barely what I would call a town!) for lunch on our way “home” and our last ride from a white-water rafting outfit got us back safely to Summit Lake, incidentally the same guys who had picked Yuri up another time and frequently travel back and forth between Hope and Seward. As an aside, Yuri claims that RVs never pick up hitchhikers and that it is primarily the tour company vans that will stop. In any case, it is entirely legal to do in the state of Alaska and seems to work out pretty well for most people who don’t have their own wheels, although I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be hitching on my own. In fact, I still had another 24 hours off before my next shift when we got back and I really wanted to head up to Whittier (about 45 miles away) to join Gabe on the boat where he works which was docked at the time, but since it was getting to be evening and I would have had to go it alone to catch possibly two different rides (one getting up to the Whittier junction, and another one heading East through a 2-mile tunnel), I decided to just stay put and save that for another weekend. Plus, when would I have had the time to write up this report?!

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Tabblo Photos