Studies from the Last Frontier

Conté crayons and pastel pencils on Sennelier l’Esprit du Pastel paper (gray tone, 6″ x 9-1/2″), June 2009.

We’ve just returned from a two-week vacation in Alaska and we had an absolutely wonderful time.  After spending a weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia, we boarded a cruise ship and spent the first week of our trip traveling up the coast into Alaska, visiting small towns and watching for wildlife and glaciers along the way.  On arriving in Anchorage, we then flew to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean and then traveled by tour coach and train south over the second week of our trip, spending two days in Denali before returning to Anchorage for the trip home.

I managed some sketching throughout the trip but got far less done then I had expected.  During much of the cruise you could find me on the open decks with my spotting scope looking for wildlife, and on those days searching for whales usually trumped sitting and sketching.  On the overland trip down from the still frozen Arctic Ocean, what was most fascinating for me was seeing the barren tundra becoming rolling hills and then mountains with taller and taller plant life until we crossed the Brooks Range and saw the trees gaining in height and diversity as we made our way south.  Seeing the change in the wildlife that inhabited each ecosystem was also really incredible.  Between all of this I did manage some sketches along with the pastel studies I’ve posted here this afternoon.  The vastness and scale of the landscape was overwhelming to me, though, and it will take some digesting of all we’ve seen to produce some more successful works.

I had hoped we might see a few whales along the way but could not have imagined that we’d encounter as many as we did.  We had literally dozens of sightings, mostly of humpbacks and orcas.  We also saw many Dall porpoises, Pacific white-sided dolphins, sea lions, a couple of seals, and nearly thirty sea otters.  Having never seen any of these animals in the wild before, this was all a thrill to me.  We were excited when we spotted our first bald eagle but over the course of our week of cruising the coast we saw so many that we often didn’t bother to point them out anymore.  On land, we saw brown bears, a black bear, numerous caribou and Dall sheep, two herds of musk ox, a timber wolf, an artic fox and a red fox, moose, beaver, snowshoe hares, and arctic ground squirrels.  I’ll spare you the list of birds (I carried a bird guide for Alaska and took notes with each spotting), but highlights included golden eagles, ptarmigan, and tundra swans.  In addition to all of the wildlife, we were fortunate to have (apparently) unusually pleasant weather through much of our trip, too.  In all regards the trip exceeded our expectations and I’d highly recommend it – we’re already plotting out our next itinerary, although it may be a few years before we get back there again since it’s a really long way from the East Coast.  I’ll be spending the next few days getting acclimated again to work, adjusting to the time difference, getting back to eating lighter meals, and getting adjusted to seeing nighttime again (we have photos from Prudhoe Bay taken at midnight where the sky is bright and sunny).  I’m also looking forward to catching up on my artist friends’ blogs to see the work you’ve all been doing while I’ve been away.