This was the first of four places I had not seen on previous Alaska cruises in 2001 and 2005.
The
Hubbard Glacier is North America's largest tidewater glacier. It flows 120
kilometres from Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory of Canada through Wrangell-St. Elias
National Park in Alaska. It is 11 kilometres wide and over 100 metres
above the waterline at its terminal face.
When we returned from our drive up the Klondike Highway to Fraser BC, we stopped at the north end of Skagway. There, a short hike up through the Gold Rush Cemetery brought us to a lovely little waterfall, Lower Reid Falls.
The waterfall is named after Frank H. Reid, the ‘good guy’ (by most accounts), in an historic gunfight in 1898. He shot the other participant, or ‘bad guy,’ a con man named Jefferson Randolf (Soapy) Smith, in “self-defence,” in the back (see what I’m doing here?) Reid’s grave has an elaborate headstone, but Smith’s (just outside of the perimeter of the cemetery) tersely states his name, date of death and age, not even hinting at his side of the gunfight story.
Many of the graves are surrounded by intricately-carved fencing and sport colourful stories about the occupants’ advertised and actual occupations and circumstances of death.
This asymmetric single-pylon cable-stayed bridge is an impressive
example of earthquake engineering. It spans the Moore Creek Gorge which flows
along an active seismic fault line on the Klondike Highway about 27 km north of
Skagway. To minimize potential bridge damage from earthquake movements along
the fault line, the bridge was cantilevered, with anchors only at the south
end.
Before the bridge was built in 1976, Whitehorse YT was only
accessible from Skagway by the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad. Over the
decades, heavy ore truck traffic weakened the bridge, and in 2019 it was
replaced. The 1976 cable-stayed bridge was repurposed as a pedestrian viewpoint
and historic site.
I have been to Skagway twice before and have painted State St. several times, most recently in 2019. It looked much the same, with two cruise ships docked at the end of the main street on this year’s cruise.
I’ll continue ‘Sketching an Alaska Cruise’ this Sunday. For today, here’s a quick mid-year review (yes, the year is in fact half over!) of how I’m coming along with my plans for 1150 Words, as set out at the beginning of this year.
Paint Every Mountain: I finished and published this book about hiking and painting in mountains all over the world.
Creative Archaeology: I have continued to build
the series ‘Time Travel with a Bag of Crayons’ equipped with the same plein
air painting kit I used for ‘Paint Every Mountain.’ The series, now in chronological order, will
include some of the photos and sketches I accumulated in past
archaeology-related travel with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the travel
study program at the University of Victoria.
Predictive Analytics This has evolved into a series of essays and illustrations of the increasingly drastic climate effects of the Anthropocene.
Our second port of call was Juneau, and a shore excursion to the Mendenhall Glacier.
I was much more successful in “quickly capturing the essence” of this landscape, thanks to the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center provided by the US Forest Service.
The sheltered, perfectly located
presentation area took in the entire glacier and even included the top of spectacular
Nugget Falls to the right of the glacier toe.
(I altered the perspective slightly to reflect the viewing angle from the upper
part of the Visitor Center but, unlike my Ketchikan composition, only one
viewpoint was required to see all the components of Mendenhall Glacier.)
The presentation area even
included a long lectern-like table to hold notepads and sketchbooks!
In my book, ‘Paint Every Mountain’ I include some tips on quickly capturing the essence of a landscape with a few colourful ‘shapes’ using an easily carried painting kit ─ a bag of crayons.
I don’t always follow these ‘essence’ tips, myself ─ especially when I encounter a landscape with as many intriguing details and peculiarities as we found in Ketchikan AK, the first port of call on our recent cruise.
Only partly cloudy the day we were there, Ketchikan is normally so wet
that its annual rainfall is recorded in feet (about 13 of them)! The main
street through town is set on pillars in the sea at the base of the lush
mountainside. Side streets are so steep some are not ‘streets’ at all, but wooden staircases snaking up the rain-forested slopes. And Creek Street is in fact
a creek, with moss-covered bridges and houses, artists’ studios and shops
cantilevered over the torrent.
For years I have tried
to see and paint things differently, shifting away from realism toward abstraction. Often the painting fights back, and I find
myself adding picky details to what should have been the finished product.
I realized that’s what
had happened here when I compared previous versions I had painted of roughly
the same view.
This much-photographed
scene was named ‘The Million Dollar View’ about a hundred years ago by the
marketing department of the Canadian Pacific Railway, as it was the view from
the (then CPR-owned) Banff Springs Hotel.
Sometimes pictures of the Million Dollar View included the hotel itself,
as in the painting below ─ one of the (slightly) more abstract ones I referred
to above.
Some time soon I am going to try painting pairs of greeting cards, one representational and one more abstract, at the
same time. Using the same colours. Maybe.
Bow Valley
Watercolour
©1991
Charlene Brown
