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The Gulf of Alaska and Yakutat Bay

The Gulf of Alaska and Yakutat Bay

Last updated on: July 9, 2026 at 11:49 pm by Dan Peterson

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The Gulf of Alaska and Yakutat Bay 2026-07-09T23:49:56-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A winter view of what remains today of Portage, Alaska (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

We caught a cruise-line bus from Anchorage yesterday at about noon, driving down along Turnaround Arm

We passed by what is left of the town of Portage, which was destroyed by the 1964 Alaska earthquake, when the ground beneath it suddenly sank about six feet (1.8 m), putting most of the town below the level of Turnaround Arm’s high tide. (Some places in the area sank even more.) The ruins of a few of Portage’s buildings remain, along with a couple of patches of “ghost forest” (or what, in my hearing, a couple of locals have called “pickled forest”) in which the trees died when salt water inundated their root systems (and, thus, preserved them). Roughly 140 people were killed in Alaska by that massive temblor, which is still ranked as the most powerful in North America since the advent of modern seismology and as the second most powerful in the world.

I remember that 1964 earthquake. With my parents, I was camping on the beach at Ventura, California. In the middle of the night, rangers or policemen came and woke us all up, telling us to get off the beach as soon as possible because, they said, a massive earthquake had occurred in Alaska and a tsunami was headed our way. (The waves that generate tsunamis travel at nearly the speed of sound.) I recall someone, perhaps one of the rangers or policemen but perhaps not, saying that the tsunami might be as high as one hundred or even two hundred feet.

It was an exciting way to wake up, but, by the time the wave reached Southern California, it was considerably diminished. It killed multiple people in Oregon, though, and devastated portions of Crescent City, California.

Another family anecdote about the 1964 earthquake. My (late half-) brother, ten years older than I, wasn’t in Ventura with us but, rather, at home. So when he and a couple of his equally deranged cronies heard about the coming tsunami, they did what certain types of unthinking young men might have been expected to do: They grabbed their surfboards, drove over to Santa Monica, and spent the whole night floating offshore, waiting for the excitement to arrive. They were deeply disappointed when the anticipated wave proved to be quite underwhelming.

A view of Prince William Sound late on a summer’s night (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

We spent about an hour and a half walking about at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, where we saw a wolf, a fox, a grizzly bear, two brown bears, a porcupine, some moose, and a number of caribou or reindeer. Then we drove over past Portage Lake and through the 2.5-mile long Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, to the cruise ship port of Whittier, Alaska.

At Whittier, we boarded the Coral Princess. Apparently, it’s the smallest vessel in the Princess fleet, specifically designed for the original locks of the Panama Canal and for the tiny ports that are typical of Alaska cruises.

We set sail from the small harbor of Whittier at about 8 PM and sailed out through the magnificent Prince William Sound. One of the benefits of the long summer days here — sunset finally came at about 11:30 PM last night — is having many hours to revel in the scenery. Placid water, vast forests of pine and spruce, dramatic mountains still capped with snow — it was a feast to the eyes. This is, to me, far more than tropical beaches, the most beautiful kind of landscape on the planet, and the most inspiring. “To the lover of wilderness,” John Muir remarked, “Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.”

Thus far today, we’ve been sailing out more or less on the open sea (on what I take to be the Gulf of Alaska), but still within sight of splendid snow-clad mountains, the tallest coastal range on earth. A short time ago, we were almost precisely below the north-south line that, beginning somewhat inland, divides Alaska from the Canadian Yukon, although the coastal area remains American and Alaskan for quite a bit more. This morning, I attended a naturalist’s lecture on glaciers and glaciation and, to a lesser degree, the ecosystems that attend upon them (orcas, humpbacks, harbor seals, birds, worms, krill, anchovies, herring, and so forth). Fun fact: According to the naturalist, the (not so very) little bits of ice that break off and float near and beneath glaciers, and that seals like to rest upon, are called (seriously) bergy bits and growlers. I have utterly no idea how to distinguish one from the other.

A Wikimedia Commons public domain view of Mt. St. Elias from Icy Bay.

In a little while, we’ll be clambering onto smaller boats, catamarans, for a brief but relatively close look at Hubbard Glacier. I’m looking forward to it. As it is, I think that we’re passing by the Malaspina Glacier right now. (The Tlingit name for it is Sít’ Tlein, or “Big Glacier.”) And we have an excellent view of Mt. St. Elias, and have had that view for quite a long time as we’ve basically come southward and then turned east around it into Yakutat Bay. At 18,008 feet (5,489 m) and situated on the border between Alaska and the Yukon, Mt. St. Elias is the second-highest mountain in Alaska and, for that matter, in both Canada and the United States. (Denali — or, for followers of President Donald J. Trump, Mt. McKinley — is the tallest in Alaska, the United States, and North America. Mt. Logan, which I’m also looking at right at the moment — such clear visibility is apparently rather rare here — is much further away but weighs in at 19,551 feet or 5959 meters, making it Canada’s highest peak.)

A Wikimedia Commons public domain image of a “horn of plenty” or “cornucopia.”.

Finally, it’s time for me to share a couple of additional horrors that I’ve retrieved from the never-failing cornucopia known as the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

“Church Provides Critical Aid to Families Living in the Deserts of Northern Kenya: Church joins with the National Muslim Leaders Forum to provide relief to drought-stricken areas”

“Church Supports Veterans as Sponsor of 40th Annual National Veterans Golden Age Games: Latter-day Saint volunteers wear glowing wristbands representing light of Jesus Christ at 6-day event in Florida”

Posted from the Gulf of Alaska, off the coast of Alaska’s long southeastern region

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