Jerry, our pilot during the bear viewing in Katmai NP, recommended us a hike up Sharatin Mountain. The hike would start at a creek near an end of one of the main streets heading out of Kodiak. That’s what we were going to do today.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any tourist map with this hike marked. Also our Openstreet and Topo North America featuring Garmin InReach didn’t display any path up this side of the mountain. Anyway we wanted to try finding it.
We found the start along the creek – but that’s where we already failed. Somehow we got off the trail into the creek and thought we should either follow within the creek or just cross it. We followed it for a while and then climbed up the other side to soon find ourselves on small trails. We knew that those could be caused by animals – on the other hand we didn’t knew if this trail going up the mountain was a real developed trail or just a way to follow animal trails along the creek.
After more than an hour following animal trails and avoiding bushland, we knew that this was in no way the trail Jerry was talking about. Also just walking towards the top seemed to be impossible as we tried several ways to get past a band of bushland (which again was not possible to get through without a machete). We decided to turn back and head up another, less spectacular trail on the other side of the mountain.
After 2 hours when we were almost back at the start, we found the real trail – which at that point definitely was more than just animal tracks. We followed it back up the mountain of course!
When we reached the top of the trail we found the nice blue-green lake we’ve already seen from the plane. Furthermore we were able to spot some the remnants of a B-18A bomber that crashed against a mountain face during the WWII era. We had a quick lunch and headed back down!
