Shuyak Landscape

 

Tidal lagoon entrance near Naketa Bay

Here are some of my landscape photos from my recent trip to Shuyak Island. As you can see I took a number of them looking across Shelikof Strait towards the volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula. The zoom lens really did make the mountains look closer.

The scenery around Shuyak is quite different than what I am used to close to town.  It made it very easy to take pictures because everything looked 'new' to me.

Patrick

Krummholz trees behind a beach

A Big Bay mudflat at low tide

Eagle Cape

Zoom panoramic of Alaska Peninsula

Shuyak Trees

 

Shuyak has the oldest spruce trees on the archipelago or it should.  This is where the trees first colonized the island less than a 1000 years ago. Back in the 1990s on the south end of Afognak I was part of a team that cored the trees there and created a tree ring chronology for the area.  I seem to recall that the oldest tree we found there was from like AD 1604.  But there should be older ones on Shuyak Island.

I remember when we were coring the trees that the guy in charge mentioned that the oldest trees are not in the places with the best growing conditions.  Those trees grow old fast and fall over and rot. The oldest trees are in places where they barely hang on and grown slowly.  It would not surprise me if some of the oldest trees on Shuyak are the stunted Krummholz trees that grow behind the tops of the cliffs that face the sea and wind.

One thing I noticed about the forest on Shuyak is that there is not a lot of devilsclub and salmonberry underfoot.  The forests look surprisingly wide open underneath.  It is like a moss carpet.  This is NOT true of the forests on Afognak further to the south where I hunt elk every year.  On this recent Shuyak trip, I do not remember getting stuck in any alder 'jungles'.

Patrick

Giant kelp - a sea 'tree'

Shuyak Wildlife

On my recent Shuyak survey I brought a big lens for my camera.  It is a pretty big lens so ordinarily I leave it at home.  But for this trip I decided I wanted to take some animal pictures.  So on the days when I hiked instead of kayaked I carried the camera with the telephoto lens.  On those days I'd actually carry two cameras around my neck - one with a wide angle lens for documenting sites and the other with the zoom lens for animals.  I kept one camera under my jacket and the other on the outside. I looked a little bulky with 2 cameras around my neck!

It was a hassle to carry 2 cameras but I think it was worth it.  I got some good animal pictures.  Another unexpected bonus was that the zoom lens also took good landscape photos.  It made the mountains on the Alaska Peninsula on the far side of Shelikof Strait look big.  I even made a few panoramic landscape photos using the zoom lens.

Anyway, here are some of the photos I took with the zoom lens.

Patrick

 

Back from Shuyak

 

I got back late Sunday from a week long archaeological survey on Shuyak Island.  But I took so many pictures that it took me until today to organize them all and make my first blog post. 

Shuyak Island is a State Park at the far North end of the Kodiak Archipelago.  Nobody lives there, and it is an island with a very convoluted shoreline - all bays, coves, little islands and lots of mud flats at low tide. And then there are the trees - the whole island except the rugged outer coast is thickly forested with Sitka Spruce trees.

It is a 'drowned' coastline in that over time it is slowly sinking, and yet recently it is actually rebounding out of the sea.  The whole Island sank almost a meter and a half in the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake.  This caused massive erosion and much of the coastline is still lined with salt-water killed spruce trees from shortly after the earthquake.  But since the earthquake the island has rebounded rapidly out of the sea - the high tide line is now close to where it was in 1964 before it sank in the earthquake. This means that today there is practically no marine erosion and that new gravel beaches are forming bars in front of the old eroded coastlines. Beaches are building! New spruce trees and grass is now growing on what were beaches immediately after the earthquake.

All this means that it is hard to see and find old sites because there are no site indicators like exposed shell middens or fire-blackened soil to examine.  We actually only found 7 new sites total which is a rather low number.  On my recent survey in Uganik Bay I found 30!  While it is harder to find sites on Shuyak, I also noticed that there are just not as many sites on the landscape either.  I'd land my kayak on little flat-topped points that had protected beaches on either side - such a place would have a 95% chance of being a site in Uganik or Uyak Bays - and find nothing. For some reason, I think fewer people lived on Shuyak relative to the rest of the Archipelago.

While on survey we also checked on and assessed the condition of the already known sites.  We had photos and maps of what these sites looked like in the early 1990s and it is amazing how much they had changed.  The beaches in front of sites that had been 'paved' with reddened, fire-cracked rock and artifacts in the 1990s are now covered with gravel and grass.  Sites that were eroding are now completely vegetated and even have new trees sprouting on them.

Patrick

More Shuyak

 

These are the last of the photos from the quick day-trip, Shuyak Helicopter survey last week.  Tomorrow Molly and I are heading back for a week long survey by kayak and on foot - camping as we go.  But first I'll wrap up what we found on the north outer coast of Shuyak.  In a nutshell - very little!

It is the first time in my memory that I have covered so much ground, looked very hard and found no new sites.  Molly and Keller did better.  They found 3 small ''hunting and processing' type camps out on Dark Island,  I hiked the rugged Party Cape coastline and found absolutely nothing.  

We also, all together, investigated a known gold mine site in Wonder Bay - but that's it.  Still finding nothing tells us something.  There are not very many sites on the outer coast.  Some of them have probably eroded away.  But the coast out there is VERY exposed (hence we did it by helicopter rather than kayak) and it is probably a place where people did not want to hang out much.  The wind HOWLS out there.

Next week on Shuyak we'll be surveying the more protected inner bays and inlets and I know that we will find a lot more sites.

Patrick

The Shuyak variety of Canadian Geese

Party Cape close up

Dark Island ground squirrel

Glaucus wing gulls