2011 Alaska - Juneau, capital city

This is Ed and I at the Salmon Fish Hatchery in Juneau. We were there in June, but a little too early for the salmon running!

See the images of the little salmon on the wall of the Salmon Ladder - above? that's what we might have seen in about a month.


Ed, looking out at the Salmon Ladder.



Surrounded by so much beauty when you wake up in the morning!

JUNEAU

Juneau is a really interesting place, it is accessible via sea or air ONLY! The "ICE ROAD TRUCKERS" don't go through Juneau, which is in South East Alaska. Cars are brought in via barge or ferry boats. There are some roads within Juneau, and a bridge to Douglas Island.

We saw a whole lot of neat stuff in Juneau. After our cruise ship was docked, we disembarked and met a tour bus.

We had a really nice Latino girl as our bus drive/tour guide. She took us to the Alaska Museum, the Salmon Hatchery, a wonderful viewpoint on Douglas Tidal Island, at least 40 jewelry shops, and the most famous Mendenhall Glacier. Cruise ships dock daily in season (May to Sept.) and bring the little town from a population of about 30,000 to a population of about a million for the next 6-11 hours. Tourism is big here, but the main employer is government in the state capital city.

Remember - you can click twice on this photo to enlarge, then use your back button to return to the blog.

Alaska State Museum

Inuit waterproof parka - made from gut and scrapped sealskin, sometimes trimmed in small delicate feathers. This authentic parka on display, was sewn so carefully that no water can leak in. All these little seams you see are turned and stitched so carefully that a needle never completely pierces the gut or skin. Seams are kind of rolled. Trim (feathers in this case) carefully sewn so as not to pierce anything, thus not allowing water in.
Can you imagine the workmanship they are showing here? It is beautiful. I know the sewing needles were carved from bones, the gut could be from whales or any of a variety of sea creatures. These indigenous people were very wise in the use of what they had at hand. I wish I were that smart and clever. We have much to learn.

This was a beautiful work of art. My favorite piece in the whole museum.

Float planes...everywhere! Look carefully, you can see the bridge to Douglas Island, the tidal island in Juneau.

Image of a vintage photo of the Mendenhall Glacier, near Juneau, AK. This was in the Alaska State Museum in Juneau.

This is the Fresnel Lense - from an old light station in Alaska. Beautiful even today, these lenses were made in France and were used all over the world for their magnificent ability to multiply the light, in order to be seen through fogs and over distances by the ships. Very important part of our history.


Alaska culture, of course, predates the USA. However, this is a contemporary woman artist, depicting a mask. My lighting wasn't the best, but this piece was a good example of the cultural art of the mask shown there. There are several more really nice pieces similar that I didn't have time to capture - moving a little too quickly through the museum.
I hope you are enjoying this - occasionally I feel like I'm writing into a void. Don't really know if anyone is there.

2011 Alaska - Vancouver, BC

We are approaching the Port of Vancouver, British Columbia in the early morning hours, after having cruised all night. It was very gentle seas and a pleasant, very small, sensation of movement as we cruised, nearly rocks you to sleep every so slightly. I was very excited to see the Vancouver. We had been here before and loved this city.

Stanley Park

This is my favorite photo of this part. On our earlier trip here, Ed and I had hiked all around Stanley Park on this trail, by the light. It is a beautiful place.

Lions Gate Bridge

Here we go - - right under the Lions Gate Bridge!
Captain says we only have a 3 meter clearance for our stacks on the ships top! Will we make it ! ?

Hey - looking back at the bridge, along the deck. We seem to have passed under this lovely bridge without a hitch.
Hmm...no one else lining the balconys to see if we made it? Well, it is early yet.



This is the dock - with the white pointy things. This is also a really nice 4 star hotel, Ed and I stayed there last time. There were floor to ceiling windows in our room with great views. We watched cruise ships loading food for a new voyage, people coming on board; and thought how much fun that might be.


Who knew Vancouver had a "W" hotel? I took this photo about 20 times before I got the W just right. (W turns around.)

Glacier Heaven!! Glacier Bay Alaska June 20, 2011

Glacier calving!
Marjerie Glacier,
Glacier Bay, Alaska
June 20, 2011

The ship you are seeing above is a twin to our 16 story tall ship! Just to give you a feel for the size of these mountains and glaciers.

Getting to the actual glaciers on a cruise ship is pretty dramatic. Cruise ships are huge, but they appear really dwarfed by the huge glaciers. Then, you look across the water and see another cruise ship! There are so many! Ours had 3,000 passengers, so at any give moment, there are a lot of folks floating around out there. Gawking at the beauty! There were two Princess ships in similar tours, along with Norwegian and Carnival cruises also.


I heard our ship naturalist say some of the glaciers are 2 miles across the front part (terminis)! They might be as long as 76 miles (could be longer!). The gather a lot of dirt and rocks as they push along.


It is very quiet on the ship when you are cruising toward a glacier. People are lining the decks and balconys to watch for wildlife, whales, seals, birds and all kinds of wildlife and/or birds.

The water is smooth at first. Then you begin to see chunks of ice floating all around the ship. Those chunks start looking larger and more of them. Icebergs!! Really!! The part you see above the water is usually only about 25% of the iceberg. Looking down from my perch on the balcony, these icebergs are large!

All at once, you hear a crunching sound. It is like driving through a slushie! You can hear the ice crunching as your ship pushes through the ice. Makes you think of the Titanic. The ship naturalist assures us these sounds are normal! It is disconcerting!

The ship naturalist is in the bridge (see photo above for bridge), looking ahead and talking into the ship broadcast system. If you want to hear her, you tune in your TV to channel 48 and listen. She is really good and spots a lot of wildlife, and also tells you a lot of things about the terrain you are getting to see. She offers lots of information about the glaciers themselves, the formation of the valleys and the glaciers. She points out seals or otters on the ice bergs your are cruising past.


Click on the photo to enlarge any of these photos, then you use your "back" button to get back to the blog.

You can see the striations of dirt, rocks and debris trapped inside the ice. A geologists dream! Juneau has been an ice field for about 12 million years, with an average snowfall of 100 feet.

Hubbard Glacier on Yakutat Bay.

These are newly calved icebergs. The colors are absolutely beautiful.
Glacial ice absorbs all colors of the light spectrum except blue. You develop a whole new vocabulary here - moraines; terminis; fiords; tundra; permafrost.

This is the starboard side. It gets cold on the deck!

All Aboard! Heading to Whittier on the Denali Express June 18, 2011

Ed Nicholson preparing to board the Denali Express in Alaska.
Saturday, June 18, 2011

It was really a beautiful morning when we left Denali National Park for the port in Whittier. It was another early morning of "Have your bags tagged and in the hallway by 6:30AM." We rattled around and got ourselves ready. We took large buses from the Denali Princess Lodge to the train station or rail depot nearby. (It was a pretty quick trip.)

Here, we were presented with the Denali Rail Depot!

Here we are boarding, with our Alaska Host ready to clue us in to the views and sights all around us. With Alaska being so very overwhelming, it is hard to take it all in. This trip was about 9 hours! With daylight being so long, we still had a lot of daylight when we reached port at about 5:30 that evening.


They are all dome cars, there are about 500 people on this train. John and Pam enjoy the day.

Fantastic Views!

June 17th 2011 ~ on to Denali Princess Lodge

The clouds cleared away and revealed the whole beautiful mountain range. My meager photography doesn't begin to do justice to how truly phenomenal this was to see.


The "land tour" option to these cruises can feel quite hectic! After yesterday's active day, we had the suitcases outside the door early again; this time I had coffee and Denali Cinnamon Rolls at the little coffee shop with Pam for breakfast. Ed and John went to the lodge's buffet.

We're loaded into a Princess bus for the two hour trip to the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge. Along the way we do see some beautiful scenery and cross the Alaska Divide. This lodge has a very pretty, two story main lodge and, like the McKinley, several buildings housing lodging rooms. It is nice and has a dinner theatre (which was great fun) and several restaurants.

We're greeted with our room keys and a map, along with the "Princess Patter"daily newsletter, which gives us the schedule for tomorrow.

Ed and I head out for lunch. It is a pretty restaurant with a great view of rivers and mountains. There is a very nice chandelier, which looks a lot like a Chihuly.



It was tough to get a good photo of this, but if you can see the top row - it is made of glass fish. It was really neat looking. The waitress told us that crazy light had cost an ungodly $20,000 and they broke one of the fish installing it. They had to fly the artist in to make a new fish.

Talkeetna, Alaska June 16, 2011

From the McKinley Lodge, overlooking the Chulitna River, we took a bus to Talkeetna for our excursion of the day. Talkeetna is a quaint little village, has a small population and many JEWELRY stores on the old main street. This town and the nice bistros, coffee shop and restaurants, usually remain open from May - September.


Our mission this afternoon is to ride a jet boat along the 3 rivers that converge here. It we're lucky, we'll get to spot some wildlife along the way.

As you can tell, the skies were kind to us, brilliant blue and clearing off. My favorite part of the trip were these eagle parents. So beautiful. Not a bad photo from a jiggling boat.


Signs of beaver activity, they really actively will fell this tree. We got to see several beaver dams, which were remarkable and huge.

We had a hike along the riverbank, to see some native village reenactments. This would be a lodge to store meats, if I understood correctly. That's Ed with hands on hips listening to the tour guide here.



On the return trip, we have the boat drop us on a riverbank near the McKinley lodge, and Princess sends over a shuttle to take us the rest of the short way to the lodge. It was very nice, this Princess folks really do have this well organized.

Back at McKinley Lodge, we indulged in a great dinner, complete with Strawberry Rhubarb wine. Made locally in Homer, Alaska, it was really quite good. I was delighted! What a fun way to end a beautiful day.




Back at McKinley Lodge for the evening, June 16, 2011

Princess McKinley Lodge in Denali Park, Alaska

Princess Line's McKinley Lodge in Denali Park Alaska
June 16, 2011

Note how overcast this looks - we were told that only about 30% of visitors actually get to see Denali, in all its 20,320 feet of grandeur. Alaska is rain forest - so we should expect lots of fog and rain. It makes for beautiful mountains and rushing salmon filled rivers.
Little did we know we would be in that very, very lucky 30% by the next day!

It was an early morning as we needed to have our luggage tagged and ready for transport about 6:30AM. Ed and I went downstairs and met John and Pam for breakfast about 7. After enjoying a nice breakfast together, we boarded a bus for the trip into Denali Park, where we would spend the afternoon seeing the sights of Denali and spend the night at the Princess McKinley Lodge. Princess handled the luggage for us, which was very nice.

We are a party of about 48, mostly people from Parkersburg and Clarksburg I think. The 48 people are all associated with the Shriners or are friends and/or relatives of the Shriners. Many are sporting WV blue and gold, which is nice, because it is a good conversation starter. As we did this tour, I came to believe there were actually a lot of WV folks with us that were not part of our 48 people. I met people from WV and from Ohio also. I think anyone who loves nature and the outdoors seems to be interested in this type of trip. We did have a lot of hunters with us, that also became evident. (The old guys that were hunters could spot the wildlife a half mile away with their naked eye, while I'm still trying to get my field glasses out of the case.) I learned that if I really wanted to see wildlife, I should stand quietly next to the old guy with a hunting vest on. Those good 'ole boys could really see that stuff!

Later, once we are on board the cruise ship, we will be 48 people scattered among about 3,000 passengers. Here at the Lodge, we are scattered around several lodge buildings, but use a common area that has restaurants and a beautiful viewing deck. The lodge is large enough that we use a small bus for a shuttle system between the lodge and our motel rooms in different buildings. Seems like about 6 or 8 buildings of rooms. It could be walked, but perhaps just a bit too far. Most people seem to be hopping on the shuttles, which make continuous loops. (like Disney?) Kind of reminded me of a college campus, walking paths etc.

The lodging accommodations were simple, adequate, pretty clean and nice enough. No room service, Not luxurious by the lower 48 standards, but I think maybe pretty fancy for Alaska. Alaska people don't seem to waste a lot of time of fluff. (And I mean that in a good way, they seem to value "real" things, not just peripheral "stuff".)

The McKinley Lodge was the nicer of the two Princess lodges we stayed in. We did not have meals together necessarily here, they were not paid for as part of the package price for the trip. This is the "land tour" part of our trip. We were basically on our own right now for meals. At McKinley, there was a coffee/pastry shop and a bar/restaurant. Both were very nice. It also had a nice seafood upscale, called 20320, but we didn't have time to explore that one.

John and Pam at McKinley Lodge,
Alaska
June 16, 2011

The bus ride from Anchorage to McKinley Lodge was about 3 hours. It was a nice bus, with bathroom. We did see a moose along the way. (Our first Moose sighting!) We also went through Waisilla, Alaska. (Yes, of Sara Palin fame.) No, you cannot see Russia from there.


Supposedly, the house she grew up in, Waisilla, Alaska.

Anchorage, Alaska ~ The beginning of our journey

Anchorage, Alaska
June 15, 2011

Flying from Virginia to Seattle and then on to Anchorage proved quite challenging! We spent about 9-10 hours flying that day. I was exhausted by the time we arrived in Anchorage. As you can see, it was still very much daylight. There is a 4 hour time difference, and we were very near the equinox and the longest day of the year.

Cool and rainy, I pulled out my hooded jacket and layered on a warm sweater for the short walk to dinner. It was a cute place, the Orso Ristorante and we enjoyed a really nice dinner with John and Pam, who had arrived earlier than we did. We enjoyed hearing about the Alaska Museum they had gone to see that afternoon.

Anchorage is a big city, actually. (As opposed to a quaint Alaskan village or small town.) With about 300,000 population, they have all the standard things Americans have grown to expect, including Ruby Tuesday, Olive Garden, etc. They are friendly people. We quickly realized we were not the only people in town - it is full of tourists. There was an hour wait at the first Brew Pub we stopped at for dinner. Tourism and cruise ships are the bread and butter for a lot of people here. We observed a lot of cargo containers in the airport vicinity. Time for me to realize that most things have to be air shipped here. There are many more pilots here than most places. Someone said 1 in 10 people here have a pilots license.

This was my one and only evening in Anchorage, as the cruise ship will depart from Whittier, Alaska, not Anchorage. Princess lines have created a main cruise ship port in Whittier because they have so much traffic here in the 3 and a half months of tourist season.

We stayed at the Captain Cook hotel. Named for the British explorer and adventurer, James Cook, who mapped the nearby coastline in the 18th Century. Ed and I found a huge diaroma of some of Captain Cook's ships - interestingly named: HMS Discovery; HMS Endeavour; and HMS Resolution. (Do those names ring a bell?) We deduced he must have been a neat fellow, sure did a lot of sailing in 1780's.

We even found (under glass at the hotel) a first edition of one of his journals, must have been published around 1800. It was a very large and beautiful leather bound volume.
[Now, of course, they are available online and in CD. http://books.google.com/books/about/The_journals_of_Captain_Cook.html?id=r7Mg8LBWBDoC ]

or free at: Gutenberg project

He sailed several voyages and covered much of the earth! From the tip of Africa to Antarctica and many interesting and dangerous places in between.

The hotel is very large, over 500 rooms. Built over a period of years, the newest seems to be circa 1978. But, it is nice and the staff was great. We had to leave pretty early the next morning to make our bus connection to our next stop:
Denali National Park (and Denali State Park) - we might get to see the tallest mountain in North America - over 20,000 feet. Fogged in about 2/3 of the time.

Denali = Koyukon Athabaskan for "The High One"

Mt. McKinley - or, as the natives like to call it - Denali. (Native Alaskans do not name their mountains after politicians!!)

Anyway, as we walked the blocks around our hotel that evening, we saw this cute little shop that reminded me of someone back home:

American Bald Eagle - nice touch for the July 4th Holiday Weekend

Haines, Alaska
June 20, 2011

One great thing about touring Alaska, is the opportunity to view a lot of American Bald Eagles. They are beautiful birds. No longer endangered, the Eagles are making a comeback.

Graceful and quiet, the eagles have about a 6 foot wing span. They weigh from 10-15 lbs. They can successfully catch a salmon of equal size!

This photo was taken with the help of one of our guides, who set up a nice Nikon spotting scope, and told me it was possible to take a photo through the scope. It was a neat option.

This is near Haines, Alaska. http://www.haines.ak.us/
We got off our big cruise ship at Juneau,
took a ferry to Haines,
then a small bus to the Chillkoot Lake area with our tour guides. (Stopping for lunch first at a native Potlach or ceremonial house with totems.)
One of the guides took us on a nice nature hike, with neat things to see and hear about. I'll have a few more photos of that later.