HaveKidsWillTravel

In fact, it turned out that we were passing right by – on the shores of Cook inlet, our way down the Kenai peninsular – on one of the lowest tides of the summer, apparently perfect time to go digging for razor clams ourselves.

We stopped at the nearest town’s supermarket, and – in a whole aisle dedicated to clamming equipment – picked up a ‘clam gun’, basically a long metal tube that apparently you plunge into the sand, cover an air hole with your thumb, pull it out and reveal the clams below.

We weren’t the only ones to have read the tide tables, though, and the Clam Gulch campground was close to capacity with eager clammers like ourselves, anticipating the morning low tide. By 10am, the air was electric as we trooped down the cliffs to the beach. This part of Alaska gets some of the biggest tides in the planet, and the sea had dropped a good 15 feet from where it was the previous afternoon – exposing a good hundred meters of muddy, sandy ocean floor.

The beach is cold and muddy, the wind biting, and the water freezing – and across the inlet stand 10,000 foot tall snowcapped volcanoes. But we’re not here to frolic in the sunshine – we’re here for some serious hunting and gathering, and with a few pointers from some locals, we got an idea of what to look for – really just little dimples in the muddy sand. The real trick, though, is to avoid the muddier bits, boot-sucking quicksand that really doesn’t want to let you go.

And sure enough, just as we were starting to figure it out, Evie fell over in the freezing, sucky mud and (mucky and damp in the cold wind), decided she was no longer having any fun. Everyone else decided their hands were going numb too, so headed back up the beach before they got hypothermia while I stuck around to make sure we had dug enough to command some respect back at the campsite.

But digging complete, the real work starts – washing and cleaning the things, and I had my work cut out making it through our catch. The foot of the clam is really the prize – a tender piece of seafood that is up there with a good scallop, the neck is kind of like a rubbery bit of calamari that is apparently best minced.

So while we can tick it off the list of quintessential Alaskan experiences – getting elbow deep in frigid mud on an open, windblown beach beneath glacier covered volcanoes in search of elusive molluscs, I would be more than happy to sell you a used clam-gun if you are in the least bit interested…

We didn’t hit the road till late, so had only made about an hour out of Anchorage when we came across a sign for Crow Creek Mine – Hiking, Gold Panning, Camping. Sounded perfect. And as we pulled up in the small campground, a 6 year old girl spotted the kids bikes on the back of our RV and tore across the campground on her bike – ‘Do you have a daughter!?”. Well, as a matter of fact… (and when it turned out she had an 8 year old sister, the kids were in raptures.) 

It turns out that Crow Creek Mine was once the site of SouthEast Alaska’s most productive gold mining, and it has the historical remains of the old miners equipment and buildings in a picturesque setting along a section the original Iditarod trail – but the main focus of attention for campers here is the lure of gold.

Apparently there is plenty still in the creek, and as we are discovering, Alaskans take their outdoor pursuits pretty seriously. While we turned up the next morning with a rented goldpan, shovel and a bucket, most of the locals had sluiceboxes (a long tray that you place in a running stream, shovel your gravel in one end and let the running water sort the rocks from your fortune in gold), and our new neighbours were fully equipped with a 1.5inch dredge (a petrol driven pump that sucks up your water and gravel into your sluicebox).

Still, no matter how you approach the matter, it’s still a lot of hard work – digging and shoveling gravel and levering boulders – all in freezing river water. And without much to show for our initial efforts, the kids soon took off with their new friends to go exploring and clamber over rocks instead. But I’d seen enough tiny flecks of color to figure I was onto something, and stuck with digging in a deep hole behind a boulder in the icy running water – till the pain of the cold was gone and I couldn’t grip the shovel anymore…

Back at the campsite, we compared the day’s haul – our neighbours had a little vial with their flakes of gold and a few ‘tingers’ (big enough to make a ‘ting’ when dropped into the bottom of the pan), and we had a couple of flakes to show for the dull burning ache in my forearms…

Digby picked up the little plastic container with our treasures in it for a closer look, took the lid off and tossed the contents into the grass -

“AAAARGH!!!!” (or something to that effect) we cried.

And he turned, bottom lip trembling, a picture of innocent confusion, to face the shock and horror of his father and brother – “but I was just throwing the water out…”

We arrived on a sunny Monday morning, a public holiday and the last day of the annual King Salmon Derby, so went for a wander around the docks to check out the fleet and grabbed some fish and chips from the local ‘hot food, fish processing, cold storage’ store while watching some of the catches being brought in for their weigh-in.

Outside of the town, a network of roads fans out across Mitkof island to nowhere in particular, so we headed off to the 3 lake trail s on the far side of the island. It turns out that a ‘muskeg boardwalk’ is a euphemism for a long line of rotting planks laid end to end through a swamp – a lot of muddy fun. Each lake has a public use rowboat just sitting there (along with lifejackets for the kids), so we went for a late afternoon paddle chasing beaver. The evening was so fine that Angus, Evie and I decided to grab our packs and hike back to one of the lakes for an overnight camp – pitched our tent on the wooden dock and fished into the twilight (no bites except for the ravenous mosquitoes…).

Fiona and Digby spent a quiet night in the RV together till three folk wandered past (with a pair of rifles – for protection…) . Turned out they had lost their car-keys at the lake and were facing the 20mile hike back to town – so Fiona ferried them back to civilisation and spotted a moose and a porcupine on the way back (much to Angus’s disappointment when he heard about it the next morning).

With another night before we caught the ferry onwards, we headed down to the secluded South of the island on the suggestion of the friendly tourist information office (who had loaded us up with advice, maps, pamphlets, posters, stickers, on the island, local wildlife, even their lichen…) and struck gold. With the sun still shining, we found an isolated campsite on the beach with a broad view of the inside passage and the mountains, and a small island I reckon we could walk to at low tide. The beach is covered in mussel beds and enormous driftwood logs, with a couple of swings in the trees and a 30ft square of old fishing net strung up like the world’s biggest hammock. Angus and Evie spotted a couple of strange little animals amongst the driftwood, and on the evening lowtide we identified them – a family of Northern river otters feeding off the mussels. In the morning, the sea was so still I could hear dolphins breathing out in the channel.

With no other souls around, the island to explore, the beach to comb, the hammock begging for a midday snooze, and my fishing technique to perfect (damn otters…), it’s clearly time to ring the ferry office and change our plans.