Cascade Creek/Petersburg, Southeast Alaska
Thomas Bay is haunted. Yes, haunted! On different occasions during the last century, miners, as well as boy scouts and other people have camped here, and had to leave, some even at night.
We visited Scenery Cove in Thomas Bay (only briefly, of course!) early in the morning, with a lovely sky, and eventually a lovely sunrise, then left this small place and turned right to see Baird Glacier, with its enormous piles of gravel forming its main moraine. From there we sailed on to our final destination of the morning, Cascade Creek. Here, a large roaring river falls violently to the ocean, creating a fantastic waterfall with spray flying everywhere. It is not necessary to say that the vegetation of the area is especially green, from the numerous dwarf dogwoods to the lupines growing in a clump near the waterfall.
From here to the fishing town of Petersburg (population 9,500) was a short run, and we arrived after lunch. In this working community some of us took helicopter and float-plane trips to the nearby glaciers and ice-fields, walked into town or hiked on the bog walk of the neighboring island of Kupreanof, where a nice path leads to an open muskeg or bog with a marvelous series of plants only to be found in such a special ecological niche as this. Labrador tea, bog blue and cranberries, buckbean weeds in the small ponds, and especially the reddish and small sundew, an insect-eating plant that obtains most of its nitrogen by dissolving tiny insects that get caught in the slimy-sticky hairs on the paddle-like leaves. Just another one of those marvelous insect-eating plants!
Thomas Bay is haunted. Yes, haunted! On different occasions during the last century, miners, as well as boy scouts and other people have camped here, and had to leave, some even at night.
We visited Scenery Cove in Thomas Bay (only briefly, of course!) early in the morning, with a lovely sky, and eventually a lovely sunrise, then left this small place and turned right to see Baird Glacier, with its enormous piles of gravel forming its main moraine. From there we sailed on to our final destination of the morning, Cascade Creek. Here, a large roaring river falls violently to the ocean, creating a fantastic waterfall with spray flying everywhere. It is not necessary to say that the vegetation of the area is especially green, from the numerous dwarf dogwoods to the lupines growing in a clump near the waterfall.
From here to the fishing town of Petersburg (population 9,500) was a short run, and we arrived after lunch. In this working community some of us took helicopter and float-plane trips to the nearby glaciers and ice-fields, walked into town or hiked on the bog walk of the neighboring island of Kupreanof, where a nice path leads to an open muskeg or bog with a marvelous series of plants only to be found in such a special ecological niche as this. Labrador tea, bog blue and cranberries, buckbean weeds in the small ponds, and especially the reddish and small sundew, an insect-eating plant that obtains most of its nitrogen by dissolving tiny insects that get caught in the slimy-sticky hairs on the paddle-like leaves. Just another one of those marvelous insect-eating plants!
