Portage Glacier, Whittier, and the Deadly Tidal Bore !!

In this area of Alaska, all of the main ocean bays are fjords making fingers into the land to hook up to the a glacier or glacier fed river. In one place the two fjords going in opposite directions from the same mountain create an area that has a very low pass and a glacier in that pass.  In historic Alaska, the miners and trappers and such would portage from one fjord to the next to access the next section of the Alaska coast. Portaging over was faster and safer that sending people and goods around the Prince Edward sound and out into the Pacific Ocean. 

We visited the lake on the Anchorage side of the portage. It is fed by Portage Glacier and is called Portage Lake.

The lake is nice and all. You used to be able to see the Glacier going into the lake from the visitor center. But the glacier has retreated around the corner and can now only be seen by hiking in or taking a ride on the lake boat. We declined these options. Instead, we decided to go see the other side of the Portage, which is the little town of Whittier. 

If you look on a map you will see that there are two Glacier carved fjords, one from the West and one from the South that come up into Alaska and almost meet right at Portage Pass. People used to come up from the South by boat and the portage over the pass to get to Anchorage. It is only like 4 miles over the pass.

Waiting for East Bound traffic.
That A-Frame sits on the Tunnel entrance

Back during WWII, the US wanted to move men and equipment into the northern parts of Alaska to protect from invasion. To facilitate this, they decided to dig a train tunnel through the mountain  that sits beside Portage Pass.  This tunnel is big enough for a train going in one direction and is 2 miles long.  The town of Whittier was built on the South side of this tunnel to support the military shipping operation. The town is still there and is mostly a tourist and fishing town now. For years and to this day the Alaska Railroad ran a train that goes through the tunnel to Whittier. There really isn’t anywhere for a train or car to go once you get to Whittier. That is the end of this sort of short side line.  The train comes in, drops off and picks up people, and then backs out the way it came, staying less than 30 minutes. It used to be that the only way that residents in Whittier could get anywhere was to board the train and head to Anchorage or Seward. Well, they could take a ferry to Valdez or some points south, but that was even more slow and expensive than the train. Really hard to go grocery shopping in a situation like that. Then a few decades ago, they opened up the tunnel to mixed car and train traffic. Today, cars go toward Anchorage on the hour and to Whittier on the half hour. Trains get inserted in there as first in line when they come in. We say one of the pretty blue Alaska State Railroad trains going through ahead of us when we were going through the tunnel for a short visit to Whittier. What we were really doing was letting Jon the engineer get a ride through the longest mixed use tunnel in North America. 

Let me say that this is an old technology tunnel. It us just big enough for the Train and the tracks run down the middle. The walls and ceiling are barren stone (granite?) with only a few places where soft ceilings have been added to divert dripping water to the side gutters. Every quarter mile or so there are safe rooms on the East side where people can shelter  in case of earthquake or fire or other incident. Ooooh, maybe if a avalanche blocked off the entrance tunnels during the winter !!

Everyone lives in that building

Whittier itself is a little fishing town. Pretty much the entire populate lives in the old army housing structures which look sort of like 70s error apartment high rises. There are 3 or 4 of them but only one is occupied. This tells you something about the size of the structures or perhaps about the size of the town. The towns industry is pretty much entirely fishing, tourism, and the train. Some shipping comes in and gets loaded on the train and goes off to Anchorage threw the tunnel. Should tourist arrive on a (possible huge) luxury liner (this is a deep water port) then they go across the street and get on the tour train and Woosh, off through the tunnel. Nothing for them in Whittier but a couple of mile walk. Oh, I guess they could hike the Portage Glacier Trail. 

We had some lunch and such. Watched a tour of 8 jet skis driven by first time tourist head out into the Fjord to go discover a glacier. That seemed like it could be fun. 

Jet Ski Expedition to a Glacier

Portage Pass from Whittier

Later we drove back through the tunnel to the Anchorage side and were driving NorthWest along the shore of Turnagain Arm when I noticed a wave coming down the bay/river that is Turnagain arm. We drove past the wave and realized we must be seeing the Tidal Bore!! Such Excitement.

We checked the Tidal Bore news and found out that the next days was supposed to be a particularly big one. Do you know Tidal Bore? This is a phenomena found in long shallow bays, essentially ones dug by glaciers, that can cause a build-up of pressure at the end of the low tide. The outgoing tidal current is rushing hard into the incoming change of tide and there comes a time when the balance changes and suddenly, the tide is coming in. It is coming in on a wave that is can be a few feet high and will travel the entire length of the finger bay. Here is a link.

We drive down the Arm from Anchorage in the morning. Looking for the Bore Tide. Things are not looking too good. The water has that turbulent look that says the wave has already past this area. So we drive down a little further and get out at a spot that is supposed to be a great place to watch the wave and the surfers go by.

We park at Bird Point and walk out a long walkway to a viewpoint where a lot of people are standing and pointing. This seems good. But when we get there they tell us we just missed it. It went past like 5 minutes ago. Bummer. But a guy with a big camera laughs and says: "You can catch it. It is only going 12 MPH and you can go 55 on the highway. You can catch it a couple of times yet today if you hurry.

And so we hurried.

We caught it and then got ahead of it and found a good place to turn off and park and watch it come. It was pretty cool. no surfers when it got to us because it was a very rocky and churned stretch. But we saw it and heard it coming from a ways out. It was perhaps 4 or 5 feet tall and very rough. It churned past us and left a lot of toiling brown water. We watched it pass us both close up and a mile away across the entire stretch of Turnagain Arm. We watched it tumble its way upstream into a turn in the shoreline and around. I hope the pictures do it justice. 

Afterwards we had lunch at TurnAgain fish house and pub in the area. Had some really excellent fish and beer sitting outside in the sunshine. A glorious Alaska Day that, of course, lasted until around midnight.