Rivers Of Ice

As you probably have guessed, we've been to Alaska.  We flew into Seattle over a week ago and boarded a cruise ship traveling the inside passage.  We traveled up to Juneau and Skagway, then back to Victoria, BC and back to Seattle.  We were gone for 8 days, including the flight to and from Seattle.

Seattle, Juneau, Skagway and Victoria were all neat - but nature trumped them all.  We saw  tons of bald eagles, whales, more snow-capped mountains than you can imagine, deep fjords - and glaciers!

Pictures cannot do the scenery justice.  I was really excited about seeing the glaciers.  I booked a glacier trek from Juneau.  I took a helicopter ride the Mendenhall Glacier and went trekking and ice climbing.  What an adventure.  The shapes and colors of the glacial ice were extraordinary.

On the way to Skagway, I got up at sunrise one morning (around 3:00 AM) and saw ice fields off in the distance.

We sailed up the Tracy Arm Fjord to the toe of the Sawyer Glacier.  The scenery was breathtaking.  We saw more bald eagles, seals, ice flows, and Sawyer Glacier.  Our ship got to within 1 mile of the glacier, and you could see that the glacier was huge.  The blue ice was luminescent.

After visiting the glaciers, the cities were anti-climatic.  Not a warm-weather vacation, but definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  I'd do it all over again!