It's layers, not cruise-weight

Mario, Kroschel Wildlife Center

Today, June 20, was the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the ship docked in Haines just before 6am.

It was cool, grey and misty – wearing layers is the only way to go, as the temperature can vary enormously within a few hours.

Our main mission today was visiting Steve Kroschel’s Wildlife Center, about 28 miles (45km) out of town.

Our morning driver, Tom, an ex-military man, shows us the golf course, which is regularly flooded by 20-foot (6m) tides and visited by bears and moose.

He points out the Chilkat (‘big fish’) and Chilkoot (‘basket of many fish’) inlets and says the sockeye salmon are starting to run. Tom has a dry, laconic delivery and like the other drivers we’ve met is extremely well-informed and keen to educate his passengers about Alaska’s abundant natural attractions.

All five species of Pacific salmon (king, sockeye, coho, pink and chum) are caught here and the route we’re travelling along was known as the Grease Trail back when the Tlingit Indians traded fish oil, which was used as a condiment for moose meat, for furs and moose hides from the Interior Indians.

At the Wildlife Center our small group meets owner-operator Steve Kroschel, a handsome, energetic man of 51 who has worked on hundreds of wildlife films and TV shows and set up the 60-acre (24-hectare) centre for orphaned or injured animals in the 1980s.

Steve introduces us to Mario, who has a red-tailed hawk perched on his shoulder and shares a similar wildlife-loving history as Steve – the two have been friends for 30 years.

Steve, Mario and Mr Seward, another guide/centre worker, take us on a thoroughly entertaining walk through the centre, a series of enclosures and rambling pathways, and we see – and in some cases pat – moose, reindeer, Kitty the brown (grizzly) bear, ermine, weasels, porcupine, lynx and, most amazing of all, a rare wolverine that Steve had hand-reared.

Back in Haines we wandered around the attractive waterfront and streets. I bought a book called If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska, by Heather Lende, as a present and now wish I’d bought a copy for myself as well.

And while in the shop we got chatting to the owner, who it turns out had holidayed in Narrabeen on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, just down the road from where we live. Small world …

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