‘It’s Yosemite, but only bigger’
Like the famed national park in California, Alaska’s Misty Fjords National Monument inspires wonder.
When the grandest figure of North American conservation, John Muir, visited Alaska in the 19th century, he compared the landscape in Misty Fjords National Monument to nothing less than his beloved Yosemite National Park. Fill Yosemite Valley with water and smother it in the world’s largest temperate rainforest and the comparison would still hold.
High above the catamaran on which I’m touring the fjords, granite cliffs tower more than 1000m, a grizzly bear roams the shore, and other wildlife scurries and swims about.
All that’s missing, it feels, is Yosemite’s weight of numbers; while up to 3.5 million people visit the Californian park annually, we’ve not seen another boat or person this day.
Resting against the Canadian border, Misty Fjords is Alaska’s second-largest wilderness, sprawling across lands and waterways behind the state’s oldest city, Ketchikan. Like most visitors, I’ve arrived on an Inside Passage cruise, sailing into Ketchikan with Holland America Line.
From here, Allen Marine Tours runs half-day boat trips into the maze of the fjords. Though the area takes its name for its near-constant haze of rain – it receives about 4m of precipitation a year – we set out in sunshine, with Ketchikan strung long and thin along the shores of the Tongass Narrows.
As the catamaran heads south, seabirds keep pace beside us, an orca is spied behind and porpoises swim ahead, uninterested in the skipper’s attempts to entice them into the boat’s bow wave.
In the Behm Canal, which is wider and less rigidly straight than its name suggests, New Eddystone Rock heralds our arrival into Misty Fjords.
An array of peaks surrounds us, some dipped in snow, others blanketed by the Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.
But it’s this craggy rock, rising 72m from the sea like a basalt skyscraper, that draws everyone from the warm cabin to the cool stern deck. From afar, the volcanic plug seems to shoot straight out of the water, though it’s ringed by the lowest of gravelly beaches. Locals sometimes converge here for weddings and graduation parties.
It’s a short journey from this landmark to Rudyerd Bay, the dramatic heart of Misty Fjords and the Yosemite of Muir’s imagination. One moment we’re cruising along the Behm Canal, the next we’re seemingly turning into the mountains, the waterways bending and narrowing as they burrow into the frayed edge of North America.
It’s as though a knife has sliced into the land, but it soon widens into Punchbowl Cove, where cliffs rise more than 1km directly out of the sea. Harbour seals, the puppies of the ocean, sun themselves along the base of cliffs with waterfalls pouring down around them.
The scene goes from good to great when a grizzly bear is sighted, foraging a coastline meadow and unperturbed by the boatload of visitors skimming past less than 50m away.
For a couple of hours we cruise around Punchbowl Cove, dwarfed by the cliffs. With the entrance to the cove all but obscured, it looks from within like an alpine lake, its cliffs scratched and shaped by the long-gone glaciers that carved the fjords.
Punchbowl Cove isn’t the end of the fjords; the waterways wriggle through the earth for a further 8km, narrowing and tightening until their spectacular end in an amphitheatre known as God’s Pocket.
We won’t get that far today, but as we idle in the cove, I ponder Muir’s vision. These walls, reaching a neck-craning distance above my head, look every bit like Yosemite rock faces transplanted to sea level, but with one difference. The Alaskan cliffs are about 100m taller than the famed sides of El Capitan, the most dramatic of Yosemite Valley’s cliffs. It’s Yosemite, only bigger.
In the know
Holland America Line’s seven-day Inside Passage cruises run from April to September, Vancouver return; from $3074 a person, twin-share, in a verandah cabin. Misty Fjord tours with Allen Marine Tours depart Ketchikan.
Andrew Bain was a guest of Holland America Line.
