Alaska Again
We decided last Spring to do another cruise to Alaska, this time to spend a day cruising Glacier Bay. We were up against a few problems - the week before, I contracted a bad cold. Also, as we cruised north of Vancouver Island, the weather closed in with fog and rain and we wondered if this wasn't a bad time to go. As it turned out, we kept pulling aces out of the weather deck. On every port tour the sun broke out for perfect photos - the kind that I said before that one would have to live in Alaska to experience rare sunny weather in order to have such photo ops.

These photos are of the Mendenhall glacier outside of Juneau, with a blue iceberg in the lake in front of the glacier.

As soon as we boarded the ship and pulled out of a port, the clouds and fog were waiting for us, but we didn't care, because we were back on the ship and out of the weather.

We took dinner each night at the formal dining room. Nice food, good service.

We decided to take a trip up into the Yukon as we hadn't done that before. The picture is of Emerald Lake, showing green because of the sandy bottom and clear water.

One of the cruise days was spent sailing up Glacier Bay which has an interesting history. In 1650, the Klingits lived in a fishing village on a grassy plain bordering the sea, with glaciers back in the mountains. Suddenly (geologically), the glaciers moved forward and the fishing village had to be abandoned - the Klingit stories say that the glaciers advanced as fast as a dog ran. When Captain Vancouver discovered Glacier Bay in 1795, what he saw was a 4,000ft wall of ice, 20 miles long at the bay entrance. In 1885, John Muir paid four Klingits to take him to Glacier Bay. By then the glaciers had retreated 60 miles back up the bay. He built a cabin at the foot of Muir Glacier to verify that glaciers carved out u-shaped valleys and that Yosemite was formed by glaciers. The glaciers are now 85 miles up the valley and are no longer retreating. The picture is of Marion glacier which calved slabs of ice with a sound like a rifle shot as the ice cracked and then like thunder as the ice slid into the water as we passed by. Marion has a 13,000ft mountain in back of it, accumulating snow and ice. All in all, a good cruise.