I assume every cruise line throws in one zinger for every cruise. In Central America, it was Santa Marta, Columbia, in Alaska it’s Icy Strait Point, Alaska. It is a great place to stay on the ship and read a good book! Check out a few on my reading list. Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons has to be one of the most beautiful books ever written. I thought his Cold Mountain was good but in Thirteen Moons he takes the writer's art to a new level. Take my word for it, if you are not an extreme kayaker or zip line fanatic read the book on the ship.
We’ll move on to the State Capital, Juneau, Alaska. Now here’s a state capital you can love; you can’t get there by car. Zero, zip, nada, no road in or out. Only by plane or by boat, and no, Sarah Palin does not live here. She had the Governor’s Mansion for a while, that would be the big white house with the green roof. Juneau has a population of about forty thousand folks and seems like a very inviting small city. The people are friendly and a lot of them come from the lower forty-eight. It is true that after you establish residency here the state does pay you to live here. The people I talked to said the payment was about two thousand dollars per year per person. It would vary depending on profits from the stock market and the Trans Alaskan Pipeline.
Juneau was the spot we decided it was time for whale watching. We headed for Aule bay and Jennifer and Scotty, our whale watching naturalist and boat captain. Scotty knew his job, within thirty minutes we were in the middle of a group of humpback whales and four or five orcas. The humpback’s would surface with their hallmark blowing of air and dive deep showing their fan tales. Jennifer said she had never seen so many at one time, and she has been the whale lady for 7 years. She and Scotty kept talking about just how much food had to be below us.. One whale named Flame swam toward our small boat and surfaced a few times. She then turned just as she was about to ram us and turned to our aft. She surfaced again and blew so hard we could see her dual blow holes, they were huge. Flame then flipped her great tail and was out of there.
Orcas, 5 or 6 at a time, would surface out of the water so that we could see their distinctive black and white markings. We also saw Bald Eagles and whatever type of seal they have here playing in the water close to our boat. Whale watching made us all hungry so we stopped at a local service station and purchased a bucket of fried chicken on the way back into town. Everybody had their fill and I got sick.
On the way back to Juneau we stopped at the Mendenhall Glacier State Park. I got out my trusty ruler and yes, confirmed that global warming is melting this thing. But it’s still one big ice cube. My Sweetheart and I were just astonished at the blue of the ice. A few days, before a few icebergs had calved and were floating in the river below. As we were waiting for our city bus, we stopped by the local salmon stream to see if we could see any of the red Sockeye salmon, as they had already done their spawning thing. There were a few, but wait, just on the other side of the stream, not 25 feet from us, was a momma black bear and her two cubs!!
Hopefully I can return in a few years and get another measurement.
Stay tuned for my next report on global warming. It was a beautiful day to see the glacier and some blue sky was peeking through. I learned that the locals called this “cloud failure”. In a couple of days we’ll visit another famous glacier but before that we make a stop in Skagway.
Skagway
We wake up the next morning in beautiful downtown Skagway, population about nine hundred hardy souls. On course, there are five cruise ships in port so the population has swelled to about fifteen thousand. It must be like the old days when miners who were looking to make their fortune in the gold fields crowded the streets. Skagway was the traditional jumping off spot to travel to Dawson and the Yukon territory. There were plenty of suppliers and merchants to provide the miners with the twelve hundred pounds of supplies needed to spend a year in the gold fields. If they could move these supplies to over White Pass it was easier rafting down the Yukon River for the six hundred mile trip.
Coming into the Skagway port you notice the names of ships painted on the exposed granite on the mountains surrounding the ships. I first thought this was some kind of graffiti but learned that it is tradition that the first time a ship docked in Skagway they were allowed to write their ships name and it’s captain on these rocks. Speaking of rocks, there is a great little rock shop in the alley at fifth street, called the Back Alley Rock Shop. It’s easy to find, since the town is only four blocks wide and twenty-three blocks long. I got a nice little meteorite there from the 1947 fall in southeast Siberia, Russia.
I you notice my writing is improving I have to confess that my sweetheart is helping out. Besides correcting my numerous errors, her incites and observations add much needed realism to by writing.
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