Alaskan History
RIM OF RED WATER TIM JONES
In Kodiak and several other settlements along the coast of Alaska, people wear t-shirts which quip, "This may not be the end of the earth, but you can see it from here." Out across those open turbulent waters in the Aleutian Islands, among the last to be explored by Europeans, is where Christopher Columbus, if he could have sailed farther, might have taken his three ships right off the edge of the Earth, somewhere west of Kodiak. Twenty-one years after Columbus made his famous landing, when the Spanish explorer Balboa hiked across the Isthmus of Panama and had his first view of the ocean he called "pacific," he might not have used that term if he could have seen to the north toward that edge of the Earth in the waters where the weather begins, the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering and Chukchi Seas and the Sea of Japan. The violence of the storms generated in those waters would have brought to mind anything but “pacific." The most recent United States Coast Pilot for the area describes it this way: "The weather of the Aleutians is characterized by persistently overcast skies, strong winds and violent storms. It is often variable and quite local. Clear weather is
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