Linux Lunacy 2003: Cruising the Big Picture, Part III

Here's Part I of Doc's series. And here's Part II.

The weirdest things about Sitka are its volcanos. When I looked out the cabin window at dawn, the first sights that grabbed my eyes were Mt. Edgecumbe and Crater Ridge, a pair of volcanos clearly of recent vintage. Anything much older than 10,000 years would have been scarred or scraped away completely by ice age glaciers. Mt. Edgecumbe stands around 3200 feet high, and it's the Mt. Fuji of Sitka. It not only resembles Mt. Fuji but shares with it a shape and composition typical of volcanos near subduction faults, where one lithospheric plate slides under another. Alaska features one of the world's longest faults, along the Aleutian archipelago; but it starts more than 1,000 miles to the west of Sitka. So Mt. Edgecumbe just sits there looking like it belongs in Hawaii.

Mt. Edgecumbe hasn't been active for more than two hundred years, although smoke did rise from the volcano on April Fools Day in 1995, when Porky Oliver Pickar torched fifty tires in the caldera.

Mt. Edgecumbe, Alaska's Most Tropical Volcano

In the fullness of geologic time, Mt. Edgecumbe is a zit. It showed up nine thousand years ago, shortly after waters covered the Bering land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. By that time the ancestors of today's Native Americans had crossed the bridge and dispersed throughout the Americas. Many remained in Alaska, of course, which means Mt. Edgecumbe is among the world's few volcanos watched by humans since its birth.

Sitka remains a native place, perhaps even more so than other familiar Southeast Alaskan towns. In spite of the prominence of St. Michael's Cathedral, the Russian Orthodox church in the heart of town, the deepest cultural roots clearly are those that predate modern immigrants by many millennia. Tlingit dancers are the main attraction at the town's welcome center. The bus tour we took around town was run by local natives. It was cheap, too, unlike many shore excursion packages sold on the boat. And one gathers that the local history, which is highlighted by both cooperation and conflict between natives and Russian fur traders, ultimately was won by the natives.

For the fourth day in a row, we lucked out on weather. Sitka gets close to 100 inches of rain per year, but none (that I recall) fell on the day we were there. That gave my little group a chance to hang out at St. Michael's, visit the National Historic Park (the first of its kind) and watch salmon spawn in the Indian River. The fish were thick as rocks in the water, which runs through a rain forest. Spawning isn't a pretty process. The river serves as both a hospice and a graveyard for the fish, which lay their eggs then croak, rot and stink on the shores. It was interesting stuff, but that evening few of us had an appetite for salmon.

We had a fun time in Sitka, but the day's highlight came in the evening, when Linus gave his annual State of the Kernel talk. For a while we were afraid he might not get a chance; the captain had announced that large seas were expected until a bit past midnight, when the Amsterdam would round the corner of Baranoff Island and head to the protected waters leading to Ketchican, our next stop on the cruise.

Fortunately, the seas were far less rough than we feared, and Linus' talk went off without a hitch. A transcription of the whole thing will be posted on the LJ site next week.

Later we had a great dinner (with a dutch hat theme), after which we went upstairs to the Lido deck. There again we were treated to spectacular water effects in the main, and very closed, pool.