The heavy forestation of the Northwest Coast ceases finally at the Kenai Peninsula. Kadiak Island is sparsely wooded in sylvan groves, with green slopes and valleys between; but the islands lying beyond are bare of trees. Sometimes a low, shrubby willow growth is seen; but for the most part the thousands of islands are covered in summer with grasses and mosses, which, drenched by frequent mists and rain, are of a brilliant and dazzling green.
The Aleutian Islands drift out, one after another, toward the coast of Asia, like an emerald rosary on the blue breast of Behring Sea. The only tree in the Aleutian Islands is a stunted evergreen growing at the gate of a residence in Unalaska, on the island of the same name.
The prevailing atmospheric color of Alaska is a kind of misty, rosy lavender, enchantingly blended from different shades of violet, rose, silver, azure, gold, and green. The water coloring changes hourly. One passes from a narrow channel whose waters are of the most delicate green into a wider reach of the palest blue; and from this into a gulf of sun-flecked purple.
The summer voyage out among the Aleutian Islands is lovely beyond all description. It is a sweet, dreamlike drifting through a water world of rose and lavender, along the pale green velvety hills of the islands. There are no adjectives that will clearly describe this greenness to one who has not seen it. It is at once so soft and so vivid; it flames out like the dazzling green fire of an emerald, and pales to the lighter green of the chrysophrase.
Marvellous sunset effects are frequently seen on these waters. There was one which we saw in broad gulfs, which gathered in a point on the purple water about nine o'clock. Every color and shade of color burned in this point, like a superb fire opal; and from it were flung rays of different coloring—so far, so close, so mistily brilliant, and so tremulously ethereal, that in shape and fabric it resembled a vast thistle-down blowing before us on the water. Often we sailed directly into it and its fragile color needles were shattered and fell about us; but immediately another formed farther ahead, and trembled and throbbed until it, too, was overtaken and shattered before our eyes.
At other times the sunset sank over us, about us, and upon us, like a cloud of gold and scarlet dust that is scented with coming rain; but of all the different sunset effects that are but memories now, the most unusual was a great mist of brilliant, vivid green just touched with fire, that went marching down the wide straits of Shelikoff late one night in June.
Early on the morning after leaving Cook Inlet, the "early-decker" will find the Dora steaming lightly past Afognak Island through the narrow channel separating it from Marmot Island. This was the most silvery, divinely blue stretch of water I saw in Alaska, with the exception of Behring Sea. The morning that we sailed into Marmot Bay was an exceptionally suave one in June; and the color of the water may have been due to the softness of the day.
We had passed Sea Lion Rocks, where hundreds of these animals lie upon the rocky shelves, with lifted, narrow heads, moving nervously from side to side in serpent fashion, and whom a boat's whistle sends plunging headlong into the sea.
The southern point of Marmot Island is the Cape St. Hermogenes of Behring, a name that has been perpetuated to this day. The steamer passes between it and Pillar Point, and at one o'clock of the same day through the winding, islanded harbor of Kadiak.
This settlement is on the island that won the heart of John Burroughs when he visited it with the famous Harriman Expedition—the Island of Kadiak.