The Seward Highway – An All American Road /Scenic Byway

Saturday, June 06, 2009 – Day 37

We left Anchorage on the Seward Highway.  This highway carries the highest designation for Scenic Byways in the USA,  it is called an All American Road and with good reason.  The first section outside of Anchorage follows the shore of Cook Inlet, past Beluga Point, so named because Beluga whales frequent this area.  The tide was coming in and it seemed to roll up the inlet.  It was quite impressive.  The road then travels through the Chugach National Forest and through some of the most spectacular scenery we have experienced on this trip.   Craggy volcanic mountain peaks seem to rise all around us.  Apparently the Kenai Peninsula that we are travelling through right now is part of the Pacific Rim of Fire.  As a matter of fact when we go to Homer on the other side of the peninsula we will be able to see Mount Redoubt which is right now, venting steam and gases, but not ash.

We are camped at the Stoney Creek RV Park approx 7 miles outside of Seward, Alaska.  We can occasionally hear the sound of the Alaska Railway engines as they sound their whistles which echo in the canyon. Right now the park is still pretty quiet, they are waiting for the Fourth of July onslaught of campers.  After dinner we walked down to the river where about a dozen Bald Eagles were putting on an aerial show for us.  They are very difficult to capture with our digital camera, by the time we find them, focus and zoom, the shutter is too slow to capture the scene and I’m sticking with that story.

Seward seems to be a nice little town.  Very friendly people as we have found throughout Alaska. We seem to be enjoying the smaller towns the best.  Anchorage is just another big city, with the same stores, etc.  Nothing to really hold you there.  We found all kinds of gift, craft and art stores in Seward and I think that we walked through most of them.

We took a drive out to Lowell Point just outside the town and saw a bunch of people with binoculars and spotting scopes looking out into the bay.  We stopped to see what they were looking at, thinking that maybe they had seen a whale in the bay.  I got out of the truck and asked one of the fellows with binoculars trained out in the bay, what he was looking at.  Apparently, this was a group of birders and they had seen a Red Headed Clam Digger and the fellow eagerly passed the binoculars to me.  I looked along the shore and they appeared like a bunch of birds to me.  I found out afterwards that what they were looking at was in fact a Black Oystercatcher.  (I got the story wrong – they have Red bills and catch Oysters not clams.  They are all black except for their red bills – not red headed at all…Guess I will never make it as birder!)

For those that have been following this blog we had a feature called spot the moose.  This is a variation called Spot the Eagle.  (You’ll need to have an Eagle eye for this!!!!) 

 

Tomorrow, we are trying another whale watching tour.  We understand from the Ranger at the National Park Service office (Seward sits inside Kenai Fjords National Park), that there are a number of whales in the area now.  Orca, Grey and Bowhead whales apparently can be seen along with seals and sea otters.  Hopefully we will see some tomorrow.