originally uploaded by jsevier14.
If you want to fork over huge amounts of cash, cruises offer bunches of prepaid tours. Again, using the logic that this would be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, it would be easy to sign up for $1,000 worth. But, I just did the one, a “Photo Safari” in Juneau. Actually Missy signed me up for it. I probably wouldn’t have done it on my own, so Missy did it for me, while her mother, Aunt Sharon, and she took a whale watching tour.
The tour started out at Mendenhall Glacier, which is within the Juneau city limits. This was another repeat appearance for me, and I am sure it is obvious at this point I don’t mind that. All of these places bear a second look, certainly. And I am not particularly fond of dramatic declarations, but, when you pull into the parking area at Mendenall, you whip around a parking circle then BOOM, there it is, this massive sheet of ice slowly making it’s way into Mendenhall Lake. It’s truly breath-taking.
We had a nice group, one couple from not-too-far-away-from-home Louisville. The gentleman won the cone of shame I believe when he amused the tour guide by telling her he wanted to see a bear up close. She shared an experience with such an opportunity of her own that made the suggestion even more ridiculous. Seems she’s only still with us because one of her hiking companions was alert enough to carry Bear Spray, and even with that her party’s escape was narrow. Trust me people, cruisers do not want to see a bear up close. Bears want to be left alone.
Oh, well, anyway… The hike, yeah it was total awesomeness. Views of the ice, lots of local plant life, including Devil’s Club (pictured above). If you’d like an authentic Alaska souvenir, consider taking home a thorn from one of these little monster plants. Get one of these spines embedded in your skin and, well, that sucks. It is incredibly hard to remove and it hurts like crazy. You’ll see in the pictures how nasty sharp and long they are. So, we were warned to stay far far away from it. Well, we, except me. Stacy, the tour guide, told me I could do what I wanted, so I climbed right up there right underneath of it with my macro lens. And no I didn’t get a spine to take home with me. :)
So you look at this plant and think “DANGER, STAY AWAY” but believe it or not, to the natives this is an incredibly rich plant for human consumption, both as a medicine for treatment of Type II Diabetes, and also as a food, if you get to it before the shoots grow the prickly’s. A little butter, a little spice of choice… I’ll take their word for it that it tastes pretty good.
That was the first half of the tour, a hike on one of Mendenhall’s trails that ended by a road not to far from the parking lot, where we saw on one side a pond with a Beaver City constructed in it, and on the other, a bus waiting for us to pile on it so we could go catch some whales. Well, more like see and maybe photograph some whales, which turned out to be pretty hard. The water in Auke Bay was choppy, and the boat was moving most of the time. The pilot stopped a few times, but the choppy water still had us bobbing up and down. Then there was the small issue of whales staying submerged most of the time, only popping up for a few seconds, then disappearing again. Shooting whales requires more than a half hour on a boat. But, I managed to get a few anyway. They were “Bubble Net Feeding”, a relatively rare phenomenon where whales swim in a tightening circle, blowing bubbles upward below a school, somehow trapping them for at least a few seconds. The whales then open wide and swim upward, wiping out whole schools all at once. This makes them very happy, and playful, so they bob up and down, swat their tails on the water, and pat their fins.
And then just like that we turned around and headed back to the dock. On the way we found a raft of sea lions sun bathing on a buoy, which made for some fun pictures on the way back to the dock.
The tour would amount to half the day. I figured my companions would be craving some serious boat time after their tour, but no, they were up for the Mount Roberts Tramway ride up to the top of well, Mount Roberts where the featured attraction is a stunning panoramic view of the Gastineau Channel, of which I happily captured and will include in the final panorama set. Another hike back from the visitor’s center, and we found on the way a large cage with the beautiful “Lady Baltimore,” a bald eagle who survived a poaching attempt by shotgun in 2006. She was blinded in one eye, which makes her survival in the wild unlikely, so she’s kept in the cage and fed as much as an eagle can eat in return for giving all of us a close up look.
Go See Alaska Day 4 - Juneau here...
The tour started out at Mendenhall Glacier, which is within the Juneau city limits. This was another repeat appearance for me, and I am sure it is obvious at this point I don’t mind that. All of these places bear a second look, certainly. And I am not particularly fond of dramatic declarations, but, when you pull into the parking area at Mendenall, you whip around a parking circle then BOOM, there it is, this massive sheet of ice slowly making it’s way into Mendenhall Lake. It’s truly breath-taking.
We had a nice group, one couple from not-too-far-away-from-home Louisville. The gentleman won the cone of shame I believe when he amused the tour guide by telling her he wanted to see a bear up close. She shared an experience with such an opportunity of her own that made the suggestion even more ridiculous. Seems she’s only still with us because one of her hiking companions was alert enough to carry Bear Spray, and even with that her party’s escape was narrow. Trust me people, cruisers do not want to see a bear up close. Bears want to be left alone.
Oh, well, anyway… The hike, yeah it was total awesomeness. Views of the ice, lots of local plant life, including Devil’s Club (pictured above). If you’d like an authentic Alaska souvenir, consider taking home a thorn from one of these little monster plants. Get one of these spines embedded in your skin and, well, that sucks. It is incredibly hard to remove and it hurts like crazy. You’ll see in the pictures how nasty sharp and long they are. So, we were warned to stay far far away from it. Well, we, except me. Stacy, the tour guide, told me I could do what I wanted, so I climbed right up there right underneath of it with my macro lens. And no I didn’t get a spine to take home with me. :)
So you look at this plant and think “DANGER, STAY AWAY” but believe it or not, to the natives this is an incredibly rich plant for human consumption, both as a medicine for treatment of Type II Diabetes, and also as a food, if you get to it before the shoots grow the prickly’s. A little butter, a little spice of choice… I’ll take their word for it that it tastes pretty good.
That was the first half of the tour, a hike on one of Mendenhall’s trails that ended by a road not to far from the parking lot, where we saw on one side a pond with a Beaver City constructed in it, and on the other, a bus waiting for us to pile on it so we could go catch some whales. Well, more like see and maybe photograph some whales, which turned out to be pretty hard. The water in Auke Bay was choppy, and the boat was moving most of the time. The pilot stopped a few times, but the choppy water still had us bobbing up and down. Then there was the small issue of whales staying submerged most of the time, only popping up for a few seconds, then disappearing again. Shooting whales requires more than a half hour on a boat. But, I managed to get a few anyway. They were “Bubble Net Feeding”, a relatively rare phenomenon where whales swim in a tightening circle, blowing bubbles upward below a school, somehow trapping them for at least a few seconds. The whales then open wide and swim upward, wiping out whole schools all at once. This makes them very happy, and playful, so they bob up and down, swat their tails on the water, and pat their fins.
And then just like that we turned around and headed back to the dock. On the way we found a raft of sea lions sun bathing on a buoy, which made for some fun pictures on the way back to the dock.
The tour would amount to half the day. I figured my companions would be craving some serious boat time after their tour, but no, they were up for the Mount Roberts Tramway ride up to the top of well, Mount Roberts where the featured attraction is a stunning panoramic view of the Gastineau Channel, of which I happily captured and will include in the final panorama set. Another hike back from the visitor’s center, and we found on the way a large cage with the beautiful “Lady Baltimore,” a bald eagle who survived a poaching attempt by shotgun in 2006. She was blinded in one eye, which makes her survival in the wild unlikely, so she’s kept in the cage and fed as much as an eagle can eat in return for giving all of us a close up look.
Look close to our right just above the beak and you can see where her eye was gouged out. Shameful. But, she survived it, and she seems to thrive in her role as teacher for the rest of us.
Go See Alaska Day 4 - Juneau here...
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