Hiking the Tonsina Creek Trail Near Seward

It's so nice to visit some of our favorite places and have additional time to do some of the things we had wished we had been able to do on earlier visits.  So it is in Seward, Alaska, where we have 10 full days to venture beyond what we were able to do in 2016.

One of the things we wanted badly to do was to hike the Tonsina Creek Trail, which starts at the end of the road south of Seward with its trailhead in the Lowell Point State Recreation Site:

It was a three mile bike ride from our campground to the trailhead, which gave us time to explore the sights and sounds along the shore of Resurrection Bay to the south of Seward.  We saw three waterfalls, of which this was the most unique, sheeting down over a sheer cliff face:

The parking area for the trail also served a day-use beach, which we scouted for a possible kayak paddle in a few days.  As it happened, we climbed over the rise to see a group of sea kayakers paddling by.  The air was thick with smoke from the Swan Lake Fire, north of Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, so the paddlers appeared a little like apparitions on the water:

Other visitor came to the beach to simply spend some quiet time dipping their toes in the water and enjoying a picnic lunch:

Our trail started by climbing steeply through a spruce rainforest.  The ground was lush with ferns and a variety of green groundcover, including the dreaded hogweed:

It wasn't long before we reached an old Jeep road that serves as the trail for a mile or so.  Someone had kindly carved an old logged stump into a bench for weary hikers.  Kathy wasn't weary yet, but she took full advantage of the opportunity to commune with nature:

The mosses and other greenery made the forest seem magical.  Here a fallen tree's red bark is graced with mosses:

Nature is trying to take the trail back.  Here, a stream drainage has simply worked its will on the trail, and it seems the park rangers have decided that an uneasy co-existence is better than a losing battle to force the water where it does not want to go:

The Tonsina Creek Trail itself ends on the shore of Resurrection Bay, at a gravel beach where Tonsina Creek comes rushing out of the mountains.  This is a native salmon stream, and signs were posted prohibiting fishing for the salmon.  We paused, first on the bridge, and then below it, to try to spot the salmon, who have begun their run in the area -- but to no avail:

Salmon or no salmon, the beauty of the lush setting was its own reward.  We had to be very careful as we walked the narrow path to avoid brushing bare skin on the hogweed that so "innocently" disguises itself as something like Queen Anne's Lace:

The wild iris, however, are genuinely themselves, and their deep purple colors lit up the meadow:

Again, the smoke from the wildfire hung over everything.  At times, it made the scene almost romantic-looking, as if fog or mist were drifting in.  But this did not smell of the ocean, kelp and sealife; rather it smelled of campfire and lost spruce trees:

We found a flat log that had been set atop some other logs, and used it as our bench for our own picnic lunch, which we ate meditatively as we gazed out at the waters of Resurrection Bay quietly lapping the dark gravel shore:

Someone had gathered a collection of detritus from the beach -- dominated by the shelly skeletons of crabs, and bits of seaweed.  We admired the work it must have taken to construct this:

It appears that the beach has slowly grown, and grasses and moss have been reclaiming ground from the seawater.  We had to imagine, however, that these are Pyrrhic victories, because as climate change melts the glaciers here and in Greenland and the Arctic and Antarctic, there seems little doubt that the water will rise again and force a replacement of sea grasses for these frontier settlers:

We must have nearly stumbled onto this little bird's nest, because she hopped out and yelled at us and started leading us away from our intended path.  We decided to follow her a way, to be sure we didn't accidentally step on her eggs.

This beach was littered with driftwood, but much of it appears to have been entire trees that floated here from elsewhere on the bay.  Some of the rootballs and trunks made beautiful abstract designs on the otherwise slate-grey sameness of the gravelly sand:

The entire hike was about 5 miles.  If we had more time (much more time), we could have continued on the trail to Caines Head, which would have been another 12 miles along the tidewater line and then up to a lake and back down to Caines Head, which is the defining point for the entrance to Resurrection Bay.  However, one cannot venture too far past Tonsina Creek without having to time the hike to both proceed along the trail, and return, at mid-tide or below.  Our timing was not right for that, and we weren't in the mood for a backpack, so we passed on extending our hike.

On our way back, we found ourselves happy that we had begun the hike early, because it got quite warm, and we encountered numerous groups of hikers heading out the trail to the beach as we returned from it.  We had been very lucky to have the entire beach to ourselves (except for one group tenting across the far braid of Tonsina Creek), and we wished the new hikers good fortune in combing the beach for their particular treasure.