Look! It’s a glacial valley….purty.
My whole family went on a cruise to the southwest bit of Alaska from Aug 26 – Sep 2, 2007. We departed from and returned to Seattle, WA.
While I have to admit that a cruise wouldn’t have been my first choice of how to see Alaska for the first time, it was actually kind of cool. Though I did hear one person refer to it as a “tasting sampler” and I kind of have to agree. I want to have a chance to get back and explore the things I saw. And this was only the tiny little bit in the southeast, we didn’t even get to “mainland” Alaska at all!
In brief, there was gorgeous scenery, I won a couple hundred dollars at the slots in the casino, thus extending my “winning streak” to two occasions, I had a great massage, I ate too much food, my family totally cleaned up at trivia (I think I was the only one who was playing of all the teams who knew that the chemical symbol Ac came first alphabetically….anyway). and did I mention the scenery was fabulous and I need to go back?
Anyway, I digress. So let’s begin.
Seattle, WA. Etc.
My immediate family and I flew up from Los Angeles to Seattle, accompanied by my grandmother and a cousin who had previously flown
up from Georgia. This was pretty low-key, and we spent the night at a motel right near the airport. A friend of my mother’s brought pizza
to the motel, and we all hung out for a few hours. I have to admit, I wasn’t very enthused at this place right by the airport, since it was
pretty dingy and generally unpleasant, but whatever. We all made do. I got up way earlier than everyone else in the morning, and sat around
calling people to keep myself entertained for a bit. Eventually, everyone else got up, we had some breakfast, and hired cars came to
pick us up to take us to the cruise ship dock.
Once we got there, we met up with the rest of the family (my aunt, uncle, three cousins, spouse of a cousin, and other uncle), and went through all the random boarding procedures. Once we finally managed to get on the ship ( Noordam, part of the Holland America line). The cabins weren’t open yet, so they funneled us all up towards the food. Ah, food. Ok, so we ate, and walked around a bit, and finally made it down to our cabin. Which was pretty nice, honestly, though tiny of course. And had a great view of a lifeboat. We all then headed over to my grandmother’s cabin, and had a birthday celebration.
Eventually, we set sail. I stood outside and just watched for a long time as we went past Seattle and headed out more to the open waters.
(Actually, first we had the Safety Drill. We were now totally set to line up in little lines with our flotation vests, in the case of pulling a Titanic. Rock on.).
my cabin view. oddly reassuring
The next day was just cruising northwards, as most of the cruise time would be spent coming back south, so it was a good day to spend with family, and get to know the boat, and whatnot. For the general record, we were on the Noordam, of the Holland America Line. It’s a pretty big boat, but not one of the vastly ridiculous ones. Like 1800 passengers, I think? As opposed to a possible 3000-4000 on the truly
stupid. But still plenty to feel huge. It’s really just a massive floating hotel, that’s trying really hard to sell you stuff. But the scenery really was fabulous, and the rooms were pleasant even though small (and who really cares?) and just being able to sit and watch everything was great. I got up around sunrise, for unbeknownst reasons, and ran out of my room, determined to see as much of the beautiful sky as possibly. It was, in fact, pretty spectacular.
oh, the sun, the sun
At some point the next day we arrived at Glacier Bay National Park (continuing in my quest!). Now, normally I would be a little dubious that going through in a cruise ship is a legitimate way for me to count having “been” at a national park, but whatever. As the name implies, you’re there to see the glaciers. In the bay. So, boat is legit, and, well. Yeah. (Fine, yes, it would be awesome to kayak, and do a bit of the real hardcore backpacking, but, well. Later.)
Anyway, they brought the boat up so we could stare at Margerie Glacier for a while (while off to the other side was the Grand Pacific Glacier, which is in Canada. Always fun to be able to point to a given formation and say “that’s another country!”). The glacier was…large. Glacier like. They look like big dirty roads cut through huge mountains. Pretty impressive. Also pretty entertaining to watch all the *other* people looking at the glacier. And, I will have to admit, it was pretty nice that the cruise ship brought out split pea soup right around then, which was, in fact, the best food I had on the cruise all week. maps here
margerie glacier. very…icy
After gawking at that one for a bit, we went around to a different bit of the bay, and went and stared at the Muir Glacier for a while. Also
exceedingly glaciery. V. enjoyable all around, and I have to admit, I’m really glad we went up there and I was able to see these places. They also had a wine and cheese course at some point during this afternoon, so I got to stand around on the deck of a cruise ship, glass of wine firmly in hand, as the Vast Enormous Beauty floated serenely past. My life is exceedingly difficult, I must admit.
The next day we had in Juneau. Now, Juneau is kind of crazy. Even though the area people live in is pretty tiny, the technical area encompassed by the city and borough is, as wikipedia puts it, “larger than that of Rhode Island or Delaware and almost as large as the two
states combined.” Of course, a lot of that is the ICEFIELD, which leads to another thing about Juneau. You can’t drive there. You can
fly or boat, but there is a huge FIELD OF ICE that blocks any potential roads that might nominally be built to this city.
not the icefield, but two glaciers meeting
Anyway, I spent a bit of the morning walking around with my uncle, just seeing what we could see. We ran into some guy who had lived there for 20 years, though he wasn’t a native, and we talked with him for a while about the area. I also hung out in a coffee shop for a
while, enjoying my only real internet of the trip, and having some truly superior coffee. I was a little sad that I didn’t have time to go hiking, because apparently you get to trails by “walk up this road. When the road ends, keep going”. However, all’s well that ends well, because my whole family instead went on small plane flights over the icefield!
We all got ourselves out to the airport (which, seriously, is next to a glacier, surrounded by beautiful scenery. Oh my). We sorted
ourselves into three different planes (the one we ended up flying in was a DeHavilland Beaver), and got to do a water takeoff from their little water runway that parallels the regular runway.
row, row, row your plane…
This trip was seriously awesome. It’s hard to really put into words. It’s just…immense out there. Full of ice. Etc. You could see little pools of water on the ice, and they were the most stunning shade of blue. We got to see where glaciers had been previously, and how they chewed up the earth underneath them. We saw a bay where two glaciers came together. (Later, after I went home, I was able to pick out the features we saw in google satellite maps. I could even match some of the pictures I took. These were large features).
We also did a short landing in a lake way up there, just by…I think it was called Antler Glacier, or something like that, and it was Lower Antler Lake? By this stage, my memory has faded a bit. Anyway, we did this water landing, but couldn’t quite get perfectly to shore, so
the pilot freaking took out a paddle and paddled the airplane closer to where we could get out for a minute. After doing this so we
basically could say we had, we got back in the plane, and flew back. We flew over a bunch of little islands and finally touched back down
on the little water field.
just in case there wasn’t enough, glacial ice
After that point, we still had a few hours to kill, so some of us went over to see the Mendenhall Glacier. While the Tongass National Forest cover almost all of Southeast Alaska, there are only a few real installations, but this one is pretty nice. The road just goes out past Juneau, then ends at the forest Visitor Center, from which there is a fabulous view of, shockingly, Mendenhall Glacier. They make the point that the Glacier (which is kind of a bit aways from the Center) was more or less right next to the Center when it was built. The ranger was telling us about the rate of retreat of the glacier, and the increase in that rate. Just that summer it had gone back several hundred feet. Craziness. Even so, huge, and impressive.
mendenhall glacier
And after *that*, as it started drizzling and being generally gray, we called a taxi to take us back to the boat dock. I hung around with
all the cousins for a little while in a restaurant right next to the dock, then we all boarded and let the boat take us on our merry way to
our next destination.
Now, Sitka ended up being kind of special. One of my cousins had some sort of emergency health problem, so a lot of my family ended up going to the hospital with her. My uncle ended up flying with her on the Medevac to Seattle. However, I personally had very little to do with
this, so now that I’ve given you the context, I’ll tell you about my time in the city.
There were two things I wanted to do here, and I managed to do both of them. The first was to go kayaking. I wasn’t going to go to Alaska
and not have a chance to go kayaking. It was originally supposed to be…5 of us I think, but ended up being only 3 (plus a guide), due to
the aforementioned medical stuff. We didn’t go particularly *far*, or off into the wild or anything, but it was still pretty awesome. We
set off from the boat dock area, and headed off around the headland of the Historic Park (which I will get to later). As we got into some
really shallow waters, we could see tons and tons and tons and *lots* of fish swimming underneath us. All those wacky Alaska salmon they
keep talking about, all heading in for breeding. Our guide took the chance to show us how after the males breed, they get really stupid,
by picking one right up out of the water. Apparently, after they breed, their brains more or less start melting away, and they swim
around erratically and slowly until they finally die. It was kind of bizarre to see these random shiny salmon corpses all over the place.
There were, however, lots of birds interested in this fish fest.
my dad is 6’2″. hi dad!
After looking at that area, we headed back the way we came, and set out across the bay towards one of the little islands, from which we
turned and went towards another little island. (all of these places were in sight of each other). I actually saw a jellyfish in the open water, which was also a little crazy. It was drizzling a little, and the spray was up a bit, so in fact, it was totally awesome enclosed ocean kayaking and I was having a blast.
After we made it back, I headed over with my dad to the Sitka National Historic Park, which was both pretty awesome, and helped in my NPS goal 🙂 There are two main parts to this smallish park. The first is the aforementioned headland we kayaked around. There is a visitor’s center, with some pretty cool Indian art, and a couple little trails through the forest. The trails have some fantastic totem poles arrayed along the route, and also some interpretive signs about the history between the Indians the various Europeans (in this case, mostly Russians) through the area. That is, it is the history and the location of a battle that took place between the two. There is really nothing physically left in those places, but it’s still extremely evocative.
I really dig the hat
The second part is the Russian Bishop’s House, which is more or less what it sounds like, the house where the Russian Bishop lived. Some
of the neater things in there included some of the original furnishings (though , in fact, I believe it belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church well into the 20th century), and a relief model of the entire town of Sitka as it had been over a hundred years ago. There was also a room in which there were cutaways in the floor and walls to show you the methods of construction they had used.
Then we walked around a bit more, but honestly, it’s a small town, and if you don’t either live there, go to school there, or plan to go
outdoors there, we about saw it. But it was rather pretty. We shuffled back to the boat, and continued on our merry way.
we loves us some salmon
We only had a half day in Ketchikan, another exciting salmon town. Ketchikan is a fair bit bigger than Sitka though. Anyway, from where
the boat docked, I could see this building way up on the hill above us, so I set out that way. Turns out Ketchikan has a system of
stairways “streets” that go up some of the hills, so I meandered my way up there (walking a little bit with my uncle, and passing a statue
of, what else, a salmon. and seeing more salmon) and found….a hotel. Of course 🙂 Anyway, I wandered in and bought a cup of
(delicious, amazingly delicious) coffee, and talked to an older couple there from Australia. They seemed surprised that I knew Australia was
rather large (“Where are you from? ” “Australia” “Yeah, the accent kind of gave it away. It’s a big country though; where in Australia?”
“Most Americans don’t realize it’s rather large…from just outside Sydney”). They also told me about this other cruising company,
Cruisewest, of which we had seen a few boats. They do much smaller trips and some more interesting itineraries. If I ever had a vast pile of money to blow and wanted to take a cruise, I’d probably try to do it with them. I mean, they have a Ring of Fire Tour! Anyway.
bastards are huge
After that, I headed down a different side of the hill, and meandered towards the salmon hatchery in town, which also is host to a couple of
bald eagles. (they have ones who were injured; it isn’t a zoo). Anyway, I learned about salmon raising, and why they think it’s good
(in contrast to a lot of the people who think it’s bad, because apparently their survival rate in the wild is pretty low, but it’s all kind of dubious), and I know now what a salmon weir looks like. I also got to see a pretty nifty looking fish ladder on my walk back towards the ship, in addition to the salmon trying their utmost to swim upstream, uphill, up a pile of rocks. Even though it’s one of those things I have certainly read about, it’s still rather strange to see it in person. Also, to have a road just cross a stream that is teeming with salmon swimming to their deaths. So that was the walk back. I also quickly stopped at the library , to meet with my family, got a book from the sale rack, perused some junky stores briefly, and we left.
We next had a brief evening in Victoria, BC. We stopped at the docks, went through Customs where they waved us through, and took a bus to the Empress Hotel, right by the Inner Harbour, which is one of the old-school railroad hotels that are pretty spectacular. I walked around a bit with my aunt, and then we all met up again for supper (Including my uncle who had gone down to Seattle with the airlift; he came back and met us all in Canadia).
Supper was good. And after that, it was , again, back to the boat, and back to our arrival the next morning in Seattle. We arrived while
we were all sleeping, so basically all there was to do was to disembark. They had a program whereby they would take your bags
straight to the airport for you, so you wouldn’t have to deal, of which we availed ourselves. (this may have lead to some of our later
luggage snafus, but who knows, there are so many luggage issues).
We had several hours to deal with, since our flights didn’t leave until that afternoon, but we also had my grandmother along, who,
though well-intentioned, is not as spry at nearly 90 years of age as she once was. We ended up renting a minivan for the afternoon and
driving out to Snoqualmie Falls a bit east of the city, which has a great view of the falls,
a beautiful hotel we looked at, and some nice little walking paths. It’s also apparently the falls featured in the opening of Twin Peaks,
which I had had no clue of until a friend of mine looked at one of my photos and informed me thereof.
snoqualmie falls falling
So, that was that, we then stopped for lunch, and got ourselves off to the airport, dropped of the car, and went out merry way home. Where
we discovered that my father and grandmother’s bags had been mislaid somewhere. Joy! But it had been an otherwise great trip.
