The Boomer Bus: 7-10-2014 Portage, Alaska WildLife Conservation Center

Post 7-10-2014 Portage, Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center

After a great breakfast at the Wild Catch Café, we made the 12:00 tunnel to Portage and made our second trip to the Begich-Boggs Visitor Center at Portage Lake to see a few things that Ranger Jim Sumner told us about on the cruise. That is a fascinating place to visit. They have displays of many of the animals that are found in the area, including a moose, which aren’t found in Whittier because of the Portage Mountain and surrounding glaciers, and a movie about the Chugach State Park. There was a new ice berg sitting in lake Portage that wasn’t there when we last visited. It’s much larger than the other one was. I think this one would be classified as a “bergy bit” Portage Lake is deep enough to submerge an 80 story building, the lake was carved out over thousands of years of glacial advances.No fish survive here due to the immense deposit of glacial silt.

Entrance to the tunnel

Inside the narrow tunnel

A new iceberg in Portage Lake

An Alaska Mosquito

Where are you going?

Well, I'm going too

Another ice berg in Portage Lake

While at the visitor center area we drove as far as we could to get as close as we could to and Byron Glacier since there wasn't a road to Portage Glacier. But, no joy. There were a couple parking areas where you could park/hike to it but, there was no way I could hike that distance to see it. Thank you Vietnam and cancer. We did see a couple putting their two children in a dual buggy to push them on the trail. Our thoughts were: what if they encounter a bear, then what? Hey, we're in Alaska, there are bears everywhere. And a mama moose is extremely dangerous if you get too close to her babe.

If you are going to see and enjoy the wildlife in the area, you must visit the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage, our next stop. They have Wood Buffalo. Caribou, bears, musk ox, fox, moose, owl and a lynx. A special treat was an eagle in one of the trees, a visitor just like us. There are many dead trees that died as a result of the 1964 tragedy. That entire area was flooded with the salt water tsunami following the quake. The entire end of the Turnagain Arm still has all the silt “quicksand” deposits along the shore. We felt a sample of it on the cruise and it is a really fine ground sand, almost like silk. It felt like baby powder.