Yes, this really happened to me in Alaska: I awakened one night to a porcupine just inches from my face, basically inside my tent (actually between the outer shell and the inner screen).
- No, porcupines don’t throw their quills. I was probably just lucky not to wake up with some in my face given the proximity but I believe you have to grab (or bite!) one of the critters to get quills embedded in your skin.
- They’re not dumb. Read below.
- Somehow in the middle of the gray Alaskan night (it’s bright there until midnight in August) I thought of shooing the porcupine away with a flashlight — they’re nocturnal, so they don’t like bright lights. That worked without actually having to tangle with it.
So, we’d enjoyed a fabulous dinner of Mountain House Pad Thai (oh yeah, the best freeze dried dinner I’ve found yet!) and fresh salmon with a friendly and fun National Parks ranger. We were WAY out in Alaska, camped at Twin Lake in Lake Clark National Park. If you saw my earlier post, we went there to visit the Proenneke cabin, which is a real Man Mecca. Lots of people have read the books and seen the self-made videos of Richard Proenneke from the 1960s and 1970s when he was building his cabin with hand tools. My adventure partner and I decided to go to Alaska just to see it — and the rest of the nearly 3-week trip took shape from there.
Two of the photos above are from Proenneke’s cabin, which you can tell is well fortified against wild animals. I wonder if porcupines were on his list of nuisances like the bears he clearly worried about when he made the food safe on tall stilts and the heavy door on his cabin?
The Lake Clark/Twin Lakes leg of the trip was the most challenging to plan as it required a bush plane ride from Anchorage to Port Alsworth, then a float plane to the lake where Proenneke’s cabin is located. There are no roads to this place, and one must be self-sufficient, so we packed in what we thought was tons of food for the four-night stay, tents, bear spray, water filtration devices, instant coffee, and the fishing rod(s) that brought us the salmon.
But you want to know WTF about the porcupine, right? Yup, I’m getting to it.
We were the only people in the campsite area for the second two nights of our stay. This was after the bear had meandered through and after we found lots of piles of evidence that moose like it there, too.
I caught the salmon and very quickly gutted it, tossing the head and entrails far into the lake. Then I even grabbed most of the sand/rocks on the beach where I’d gutted it and threw them into the water too. That’s because we’d been warned that something as minor as a fish thrashing in the water could attract bears and we didn’t want that. We had a bear proof food container (bear can) just for fishing, so we submerged the gutted fish in water inside the bear can, then weighed it down with rocks and set it back in the lake, hoping a bear couldn’t find it there.
Our friend the ranger, who lives for the summer in a cabin about a half-mile down the beach from the campsite, was kind enough to bring a large frying pan for the fish. We stoked a roaring fire, reconstituted the pad thai in its envelope, and put the fish on to fry. What a night we had! Great dinner and conversations under the stars, just the three of us, until very late.
That’s when the porcupine comes in. We’d gone to sleep when the sky finally got dark — around midnight. But I was awakened not long after by a scratching, chewing sound. Damn, I thought, a bear is digging through the campfire embers looking for any remnants of the fish dinner. I knew I couldn’t let any animal get habituated to finding food at the campsite, so I got out of my tent, grabbed my hiking poles, and started making noise as I approached the fire ring.
Rather than a bear there was a tan-colored animal on the other side of a bench near the fire pit. Its back seemed as high as the seat so my first thought was that it might be a coyote? But then I wondered if Alaska even has coyotes. I got closer, thankful that it wasn’t a bear, and continued making noise to scare it off. It wasn’t that motivated to leave. Actually the creature sat down and glared at me with its beady black eyes. It was the largest porcupine I’d ever seen, and a tan color too, rather than the gray/black ones we have at home. After a minute or two of my harassment the porcupine reluctantly disappeared into the brush and I went back to bed.
A half-hour later I heard something near my partner’s tent. Scratching, maybe some chewing. I really didn’t want to get up again so I waited. This time he awakened and yelled “Get Out Of HERE!” which made the porcupine trundle away … for a bit. I went out again and clapped my hiking poles together to enforce the order and he climbed a tree nearby. Groggy as I was, I thought maybe porcupines aren’t used to being told what to do.
One last time before dawn I awakened to a scratching, chewing noise and yes, this time the damned porcupine was right next to me, inside the outer shell of my tent. He’d found those hiking poles that I used to chase him with and was busily chewing the hand grips off the end. This is when I used my flashlight in his face to get him to leave.
The next morning I thought I had a pretty funny story to tell my travel partner, who’d never actually seen Pesky Pete the Porcupine. But that wasn’t the end of the story.
That night, our last in the campground, I was again awakened by the porcupine. I wanted no more of the sleeplessness and chasing him around but he apparently thought differently. He wanted revenge. At least twice that night the porcupine found its way under the outer shell of my tent to chew on my belongings. It was hard enough to squeeze into a small, one-person tent with my boots, jacket, hiking poles, flashlight, and other items in order to protect them — and another to keep climbing in and out of the tent (zip/unzip time and time again) to go another round with my prickly adversary.
I believe the porcupine decided to aggravate me because I’d been the one to chase him away so many times. My travel partner had some minor damage to his fishing rod holder but none to his leather boots which he left outside his tent. The bear can we used to store our food was well-chewed, all the way around the cover, a nice souvenir from the trip. I was also rewarded with chewed hiking poles and even holes in my tent through which the creature found my rain jacket — also chewed up — as well as my sunglasses which were in the pocket.
So, do you still think bears are the biggest issue when visiting Alaska?
She's Gone 