Alaska Vacation

July 8 -Day 4

Blue Ice and Whales

Tuesday we arrived in Juneau and most of us availed ourselves of a whale-watch trip. It came with a bus-ride to a bay about 10 miles outside of Juneau which has a 47 mile highway that goes nowhere. High up in the mountains, the Juneau snowfield supports many glaciers. The Mendenhall glacer is just up the valley from Juneau and can be seen in the middle of the picture above. There were a couple in the group who took a helicopter ride up and onto the glacier - a great excursion they said.

The whale-watch trip turned out to be very successful with a pod of orcas all around the boat, and humpback whales across the channel.

Orcas above, and a humpback to the right. It was the best trip in regard to the number of whales sighted, so far this season, the skipper said. The people that ran the trip were very

knowledgable about the sea life -- orcas stay with their mothers through their life; there might be several in such a family -- so these folks who are marine biologists are not in favor of orcas in captivity. All of the orca pods from southeast Alaska down through Vancouver Island have been documented, and if you have an identification book, you can name a particular pod. There are resident and transient pods. The residents eat salmon and other fish, and the transients eat seals and even sea lions.

The cruise ship was at Juneau only for the morning. The afternoon was spent in sailing up a fiord to a glacer south of Juneau. The weather continued cloudy and sometimes misty as we sailed for the glacier. I took a photo of a mountain glacier as we started up the fiord, and when I examined it full size, I might have been lucky enough to catch an avalanche breaking off of the front of the glacier.



Left Picture bottom left: an ice-fall or just a cloud?"

Travel brochures showed beautiful pictures of blue ice, but I never comprehended it until I saw in in the fiord. When ice is put under immense pressure by a glacier, it turns a brilliant blue. The blue shade is in the mountain glacier above. Further up the fiord there were small chunks of ice that were just as blue; absolutely fascinating.

There wasn't a lot of ice as we sailed up the fiord, not even near the glacier as we found out. But the landscape, carved by the glacier, assumed mind-boggling proportions, rising from a thousand foot sea bottom less than a hundred yards away, straight up a mile from the surface into the snow and clouds. This is as wild a landscape that I ever experienced - it seemed like the earth at the time of its creation. Proportions are deceiving in the picture. The height of the wall below the clouds in the picture is more than 2000 feet. Streams and waterfalls run everywhere from the snow above.
The ship reached the glacier about 8pm and we almost didn't see it because it was quite misty at first. It was cold too; just like being in a deep freeze with the glacier and the ice on the water bounded by steep fiord walls.

The ship stopped and did a 180-degree pivot; we didn't have a lot of time because we had to be out of the fiord and the ice before dark. The mist suddenly cleared, allowing some pictures to be taken.