Today we visited El Capitan Cave, Alaska’s longest mapped cave. The US Forest Service offers free tours, and we had called and reserved a spot for this afternoon so we could catch the high tide this evening in Dry Passage directly afterwards.
After another slow start this morning, we packed up our things and said farewell to Devilfish Bay. On the way out we pulled up the shrimp pot and got another 56 shrimp, so our freezer is getting pretty full of Alaska’s bounty! I love eating the things we catch ourselves, it’s so satisfying.
The El Capitan Cave has a dock, but because of conflicting information we didn’t use it except to tie up the dinghy. According to our tour guides, we could have tied the boat up there, so now we know. Anyway, anchoring worked fine.
Ryan and I have actually done some fairly serious caving before, so this felt tame - no rappelling or ropes, no squeezing through narrow gaps or crawling through low passages or wading/swimming through water - but the cave and its setting were lovely. The cave opens invitingly in the side of a hill and you can just walk in; it’s very civilized. Saying that, it’s a natural cave - no lights or stairs or walkways. Visitors can see the first little bit of the cave on their own, but there’s a gate that protects the cave from further, unsupervised explorations. Our tour guides were two college students working for the forest service for the summer.
The US Forest Service discovered the cave back in the 80s, and when they realized the extent of it they stopped the logging above the cave system; consequently, the walk to the cave runs through some beautiful old growth forest. One of the cool things that we saw was how the trees actually grow into the rock of the karst landscape.
After the tour, we went back through Dry Passage, out into Sumner Strait, and took advantage of the calm evening to go north to Hole in the Wall. On our way past Marble Creek in Shakan Bay, we saw a huge (presumably marble) quarry. It looked like snow from a distance, but was piles of white rock.
The two-hour trip up the coast was so peaceful, with the sun getting low in the sky, the seas calm, and the seals, otters, and whales silhouetted on the calm, glistening waters.
Hole in the Wall has a 1/2-mile long entrance that gets very narrow before opening up into a pretty little cove. The entrance is fairly shallow, so we’ll have to make sure we’ve got at least a half-tide when we leave tomorrow. (It was high tide when we arrived.)
There’s one other boat in here, the first pleasure craft we’ve seen in a few days. We got in too late to take the dinghy out, so no pictures of the anchorage tonight.
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