We left the campsite and drove into Seward. We did a bunch of provisioning, Tom did some work, and we took a last walk around the city - and got another gelato and sorbet - before heading for Whittier. We found a very nice campsite on a small lake near the Portage Glacier before the tunnel, so we made plans to take a walk on the Trail of Blue Ice in the morning, and then head for Whittier to see the two buildings where everyone in the town lives in the winter.
We listened to pouring rain all through the night, and it continued to rain as we got up and ate breakfast. We bagged the idea of taking a hike before going into Whittier, and packed up and headed for the tunnel. Whittier isn’t on the normal tourist track, but a number of people we’d talked to had asked us if we were planning to go to Whittier. We hadn’t been planning to do it, but after being repeatedly asked, and then asking other people, we were intrigued both by what we’d heard of Whittier, and by the odd look on most people’s faces when we discussed it.
Whittier is weird for a number of reasons. The only way to get there by land is to go through a tunnel, which used to just be a railroad tunnel, but which they somewhere along the line decided to open up to cars. But, the tunnel is just one set of railroad tracks running through about two and a half miles of rock, so they let cars go one direction on the hour, and the other direction on the half hour, and everything stops once in a while for trains. Once you’re in Whittier, there’s not much there other than warehouses and boathouses, and a few buildings for tourists, although a lot of those are closed. We didn’t see any houses; instead, the entire town lives in two big condo buildings, which also house government offices and schools. One of the buildings is fairly new, but the other was built during WWII, and while it has been updated over the years, it still looks like it was built in the 1940s. There’s also another enormous building that used to be another central housing/living/working building when Whittier was a military base, but that building has been abandoned and just looms over the harbor with all of its windows broken, looking spooky. Everywhere you walk in the town, including on the docks, on the streets, and in the tunnels under the streets, there’s bear poop. We didn’t see any bears, but my overactive imagination vividly pictured the people and the bears coming out and mingling at night when all the tourists go home. It probably didn’t help that it seemed to rain harder and harder the whole time we were there, and fog was looming over everything, but all I could think was that if someone wants to get a feeling for a horror movie set, they should just hang out for a while in Whittier and soak up the vibe. By the end of the day, we thoroughly understood why the most frequent thing we heard about Whittier was “Whittier is weird.”
We drove back through the tunnel and stopped at a small park where the salmon were running. What started as a short stop ended up being a fairly long walk because it was fascinating to watch the salmon making their way up the stream, and the whole stream was full of them. We also saw a lot of dead and chewed on salmon by the side of the stream, so we made a short detour back to the truck for our bear spray, although we didn’t see any bears. We went back to the same campsite for the next night, and although it continued to rain all night, we suited up and did the hike on the Trail of Blue Ice the next morning. We saw more salmon filled streams, although the most impressive thing was the sight and sound of the many waterfalls crashing down the mountains after all of the rain. What had looked like thin white lines a couple of days before were roaring cascades, crashing into the rivers running through the valley. The trail was either paved or graveled for the entire way, so despite the fact that it continued to drizzle, the walking was not unpleasant.
When we had left Homer, and even Seward, we were seriously considering taking the ferry from Whittier to Valdez. But, after doing the Kenai Fjords tour, we didn’t really feel like we needed to take another boat ride, especially since we were committed to taking the ferry to and from Juneau anyway. We also would have had to spend another day or two in Whittier - and Whittier is weird - and, probably most importantly, if we drove instead of taking the ferry, we would get to go back through Anchorage and have another visit with Wayne and Marilyn. It ended up not being a difficult decision at all, and we pulled out of the Whittier/Portage Glacier area and headed for Anchorage.
