Sue Ives: Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve

Believe it or not, I was lucky enough to have a paid work trip to Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve. It's an amazing place, one of the least visited units of our National Park system. The caldera in the center of the monument makes it pretty clear that Aniakchak is in the ring of fire - 6 miles wide and 2,500 feet deep, the caldera is what's left of a stratovolcano that blew its top around 3,000 years ago. Pretty darned impressive. The volcanic history of the area combined with tectonic uplift leaves some pretty neat geology. Depending on what portion of the monument you're in, you could find old glacial till, sedimentary layers, columnar volcanic rock, or vast barren cinder flats.

I'm not sure how well it shows up in the photo, but this is an area where Lindsay Flagstad (AKNHP ecologist and my field partner for the trip) and I saw these neat layers of sedimentary (horizontal layers) and volcanic (vertical columns) rock atop each other.

There were lots of neat volcanic features along the coast, near the mouths of the Aniakchak River and Plenty Bear Creek. Plenty of jutting columns, and even places where the intensive erosive forces along the coast wore away the rock into arches and caves.

There was another less catastrophic eruption in the early 1930s that sent ash and pyroclastic materials (imagine little molten rock blobs flying through the air) as far as 40 miles away. the ashfall buried plant communities, which are gradually on the comeback in portions of the park covered by ash. Check out these big, barren cinder flats, it was like walking on the moon.

Unfortunately, I don't have any great caldera photos. Lindsey and I did get up to the lip of the caldera, but the fog was so thick we couldn't see a thing. In fact, our helicopter landed downslope to take us back to camp and we actually had to play Marco Polo with our pilot to find him.

Here's a shot of a park service cabin Lindsey and I spent a week in. Pretty sweet. This is actually the view from the outhouse. There are lots of big coastal brown bears in this part of the park. One day, while I was in the outhouse, Lindsey came across one near the cabin. She hollered at him and he took off, which was good, but he came straight for the outhouse, which was very bad! It's never a good thing to hear your buddy yelling "hey, hey bear, get away from there!" while you're in a rickety little outhouse without a door, with your pants down. You can imagine the thoughts going through my head - boy will this be a humiliating obituary... so I started banging the heck out of the side of the outhouse with my trusty can of bear spray, which made such a ruckus Lindsey said the bear took off in a hurry. whew.

Can you see all the bear tracks? The beach was a bear superhighway!

and man, were they big!

We even went swimming once, here are my tracks out to the water and back to prove it!

And there were loads of cool plants. Leymis mollis, a beach rye, surrounded the cabin and held these neat beach dunes with little bits of beach pea (Lathyrus maritimus), Senecio pseudoarnica, Honkenya peploides, Mertensia maritima, and Cakile edentula.

and one of my favorites, the monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus)!

Working in the alpine environments was a trip, so many new plants! The first few plots were overwhelming, but once we figured out the difference between the Diapencia and Loiseleuria, we were on a roll... here's Lindsey, hard at work. This is basically what we were doing for our two weeks out.

We even found spotted ladyslipper orchids (Cypripedium guttatum), which aren't common in Alaska!

We did squeeze in a mini-packraft adventure. To cross the Aniakchak we managed to fit two people, two full packs, a shovel, and a shotgun in one Alpacka raft. We ferried across, worked upstream throughout the day, and then floated down to get back to our cabin. Things were going well until a sow and cub forced us to abandon our float, top our boots, and revert to packraft-as-sled mode for a while. Such is life. Definitely take bear spray if you're heading out this way!

We staged in Port Heiden (outside the monument) for a bit, and hiked out to the old village site on a day when it was too windy for the helicopter to fly. check this out - one of the old houses had slat boards plastered with 1929 newspapers. I liked the drawings from the fashion section.