Alaska Trip

6-18-06 JUNEAU: Our flight from Seattle to Juneau was uneventful after the usual sorts of delays. The Seattle airport obviously grew faster than the planners planned and is a hodge-podge of different buildings for all the departure gates. I got a decent picture of Mt. Ranier as the plane was climbing to altitude. They should have named it Mt. Snowier. Mt. Saint Helens is behind it in the distance to the south. The plane flew over lots of islands with snowy mountain tops and water but mostly cloud cover. As we landed in Juneau we saw the Mendenhall Glacier from the plane.

Lindblad took all the luggage, put us on buses and drove us to the glacier. We saw glacier melting into a tidewater bay, icebergs, eskers, polished and striated rocks from the glacial advance and a waterfall. A lot of the water is cloudy and whitish due to rock “flour” ground off the bedrock by the glacier and released form the ice as the glacier retreats. The area at the base of the glacier is a temporate rain forest with deciduous plants and trees. We saw a beaver dam and familiar flowers such as lupin.

When the glacier closed, we had a quick tour of the Alaska State Museum and then on to the ship for orientation and dinner. The AMNH group is only about 8 folks out of a boat load of around sixty-five, mostly westerners. After dinner, Judy and I walked around Juneau. It has lots of souvenir stores, jewelery stores, saloons and is generally fairly tacky. There was a lot of Russian stuff, nesting dolls, enameled boxes, consistent with the Russian influence as the first Europeans in Alaska. Judy bought nothing! I saw an interesting fur bikini, priced at $69.00, that Judy wouldn’t try on. We got back to the ship at sunset, ten pm, followed by a long twilight and sunrise at four am. Lindblad’s ship is the ‘Sea Bird’. She has four deck with about 30 small cabins and draws 8 feet. She has an enthusiastic crew. They do a nice job, don’t juneau. That was Judy’s pun.