And more of those wonderful wooden walkways and stairs we’d learned to expect here.
As you can see, there’s lots of skunk cabbage and red huckleberries.
The trail first leads you out to a view of the bay.
It wasn’t a bright sun-shiny day but it was clearer than it had been and it wasn’t raining much. There were lots of interesting plants including some gorgeous maidenhair ferns. But best of all I had my first sighting of a little plant called Single Delight (Moneses uniflora). It’s only about an inch or two high and really sweet looking. Their faces always are looking at the ground as far as I can tell.
There were some hikers behind us so I asked if they knew what this little flower was. They didn’t have a clue but we struck up a conversation that led us to a wonderful hike the next day. After going up and down a number of times the trail dumped us out on the beach of Mosquito Cove where I found Walter sitting on a log resting. He’d gotten ahead of us as we chatted.
If you didn’t know this was a cove you might think it was a nice little lake. The islands in this area are all pretty close in and the various straits are pretty narrow. After a little rest, the trail took us uphill through more rain forest. I spied my first trailing raspberry (Rubus pedatus) in bloom next to the creek.
A little further on we came upon a section of skunk cabbage that somebody with big paws had dug up.
It turns out that bears really like skunk cabbage roots. So now we know what Mr. Bear was doing when he wasn’t snoozing or eating grass out in the estuary. When we finished our hike he still wasn’t out there but the mountains were finally visible.
When we set out to change campgrounds (we moved to a private campground with power so we could run our little electric heater and get warm during the day) who should we see out in the estuary but Mr. Bear. He was further away from the viewing platform so I didn’t get as many good pictures of him this time but it still was wonderful to see him.
In the afternoon we decided that we might as well go see the rest of downtown Sitka. So we drove down to the main parking lot and hiked a few blocks over to see The Bishop’s House which is part of the National Historical Park. This is a building that was built when the Russians controlled Alaska back in the 1700 and 1800’s. It’s one of only 4 surviving buildings from the Russian era in Alaska. It’s been restored by the Park Service and you can do a self tour of the first floor and watch a movie about the Russian Bishop who the house was built for. They had a vegetable garden in front of the hosue and were installing a new walkway.
The upstairs is all set up as it was back in about 1850 and you can take a tour of it but having watched the movie neither of us was interested. Instead since it wasn’t raining much we hiked across city center (not far really) to see the rebuilt St. Michael’s Cathedral. This is a replica of the original Russian Orthodox church which burned down just a few years ago and was immediately rebuilt by the community. THis is the view of the east facing side of the cathedral.
This is what it looks like on the south side.
A surprise surprise this is the west side.
Just up the street from the church is the Pioneer’s Home which is a retirement home built for the original Sourdoughs and still has Alaskan Pioneers living in it. There’s a cool statue of a gold miner in front of the building.
There were gardens here and in them I found the biggest, happiest, healthiest blue poppies (Meconopsis grandis) I’ve ever seen.
Every few years the gardening community in Seattle gets the idea to try to grow blue poppies and I know no one who actually manages to get them to be happy. I heard about them the first time at Buchart Gardens back in the 1980’s and they told me they were really rare and very hard to grown. That’s true in Seattle and Victoria but clearly not in Sitka!
Having made it this far and not gotten seriously rained on we proceeded on to Castle Hill the high point in town. Here you can look back at Sitka and the mountains to the east which were nearly all visible for a change.
And you can look southward to the harbor and the mountains beyond.
Even better was the view to the southwest that includes some of those fun little islands and a privately owned lighthouse.
The lighthouse is for sale. Don’t you think you need one?
In Part XI, we’ll go on a hike to a lake south of Sitka and see more bears and eagles before we head on the fast ferry to Juneau.