Alaska Day 9 - Talkeetna River

Welcome Sign, Talkeetna, Alaska, originally uploaded by jsevier14.

On the 9th day of the trip, we’re inland at the Mount McKinley Princess Lodge. The big event of the day was a boat tour up the Talkeenta, Chulitna, and Susitna rivers. The weather was cloudy and damp, and again I was taking pictures from a moving platform.

Throughout the rest of the trip you will no doubt notice I developed a fascination with the Rosebay Willowherb. This plant is more commonly known as “fireweed.” While Alaska hardly lays exclusive claim to fireweed, the plant holds cultural meaning for the locals. It’s bright magenta blossoms show up when the weather turns good, then they disappear just before the first snow. After a forest fire, this is the first sign of new life, which might be where it gets its name.

So Talkeetna amounts to a main street, in this case aptly named “Main Street”, where the tourist spots and restaurants are. This sign, Beautiful Downtown Talkeetna, sits at the corner of Main and Talkeetna, the perpendicular cross street that brings people to the town from the George Parks Highway.

We stopped for lunch at a little spot on the opposite corner from the sign named “Sparky’s Drive-In,” which is a little misleading because you really don’t drive in. There doesn’t seem to be any place for you to drive up to a window, or park at a curb. I guess “Drive-In” just sounded right when the place was named. It’s one of those little airport hangar half-circle buildings. What got my attention was the featured menu item of the day, a Salmon Gyro.

Let’s see… as odd as it sounded at first, the idea grew on me. Salmon caught right down the street, pita bread, tzatziki sauce? This was just whacked out enough it could be good. Why not? What could go wrong?

Nothing. Not a thing. This by far hands down without a doubt was simply the best food we had on the entire trip. And that goes for the ship too. I told the cook and his cashier about it too. This, however, was almost a spiritual experience. The cook told me he just came up with it trying to figure out what to do with some pita bread he picked up. So go to Talkeetna, check out Sparky’s and see if they have the salmon gyros. And so it turned out lunch was the highlight of the day. Not that the river boat tour was bad. It wasn’t. Mahay’s did a nice job for us. The gyro was just that good. It was a hard act to follow.

I mentioned the day wasn’t that good for shooting. It as dark, damp, the boat we were on moved around too much and most of the pictures are blurry and unusable. There were a few worth showing… Toward the end of trip the guide shushed us, and pointed a bald eagle hanging out on a big rock over by the riverbank. Just sitting there… The boat stopped and we all stared. It seemed like the eagle noticed us and shot a “What?!?” look back in our direction. Then she lurched forward and took off.

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Alaska Day 8 - Talkeetna

Denali's Peak, Denali National Park, Alaska, originally uploaded by jsevier14.

And so the cruise portion of the trip ended. I enjoyed my time on the ship, but I’ve said over and again, going to Alaska on someone else’s schedule is really not the best way to go. To experience this place, better to go there with a general idea of a route, then take your time. The sun shines up to 18 hours a day in Alaska, and being rushed through little samples of it, while having certain advantages, leaves something to be desired. You’ve got time, which is one of Alaska’s great advantages.

A cruise ship the last night is a sailing contradiction. The passengers all spend most of that night in their room. You have to put your bags out the by 10pm the night before. Then, by 7am, its time to leave. So the last night is dinner, then a frantic rush to pack. 

College Fjord is not far at all from the cruises’s last stop, Whittier, which just on the other end of Port Wells. It’s about 52 miles. I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of what there was of the night, and stole a peek off the balcony. We were nearing the port, and I could see the lights of Whittier off in the not too far distance, the end of the sailing voyage was approaching. If my camera weren’t so tightly packed away I would have shot a few frames of it. It was such a stark contrast to the festive mood that dominated the trip.

So 5:54am came earlier than I could have imagined, and after we spent the morning walking around the room like zombies, mindlessly bumping into each other, we were herded into the auditorium, then the next thing I knew I was nursing a Coke Zero on a train as it traversed a dark tunnel.

Soon we would emerge from the darkness, and the sun would come out, and the clouds of the early morning would give way to a brilliant Alaskan summer sun. My camera was still tightly packed, at my feet under our table. Eventually the instinct finally took over, but at that hour, the motivation just wasn’t there.

We hurtled through Anchorage, then zipped past Wasilla, and chugged onward north into the vast Alaskan wilderness, headed for Denali National Park. I have to stop here a moment and say something about this picture. This picture was taken in Wasilla, which we only saw from a moving train. We got through the entire place in less than 2 minutes, and I never imagined I would have gotten anything worth keeping. 

The train finds its end for this day at a little town called Talkeetna. Unofficially, Talkeetna is thought to be the source for the fictional town of Cicely, the setting for the TV series Northern Exposure. It definitely has that kind of whacked out feel to it. It’s tiny, just 772 people, with enough restaurants and shops to serve the massive numbers of tourists that pass through this little town. Some people stay longer to fish, or go rafting, or some other vacation activity, but mostly its a pass-thru for cruisers to pick up their tour buses headed for the first stop just outside Denali National Park. 

We would have more time in Talkeetna the next day. For now, the mission was to make way to the Denali Princess Lodge, where we would spend a decidedly lower-key evening than we had gotten used to. When I got there, I noticed a huge deck with telescopes mounted on the rail, pointed northward. I figured that’s where the mountain, Denali, could be seen on rare occasion of its appearance. I noticed several people taking seats there on the deck, and I wondered what was up.

Turns out they were sitting out there just staring off into the cloudy distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mountain. Whether you do or not is largely dependent on fortune. Soon I heard people buzzing, and noticed some pointing. I couldn’t make it out at first, and I pestered the guy next to me, who was nice enough to point, and point again, and then again as I still couldn’t see anything. Then, after staring some more, I saw it. The clouds were slowly giving way, just enough to see one jagged edge.

The last time we were in Alaska, I saw Denali three different times. From the train, which was an extraordinarily rare sighting according to the guide on that trip who informed us of our luck by telling us she had a guy on her last trip who came to Alaska 29 years running just so he could see Denali, and as of that date he still had not found success. And here we were the first time up, with the very first chance possible, and there it was. Then we saw it again in the park, and one more time after that.

So here I was 40 miles away from it and there it was coming out for me again. I hustled back to the room and grabbed my gear, and also called my Aunt Sharon in her room to tell her what was happening. By the time I got back, the mountain was in full, thrilling view. I happily shot about 200 frames before giving up. And I did take time to stop and just look at it. Very humbling experience.

And the pictures, all 200+ of them, came out like crap.

The haze was just really too much. I mean, we were 40 miles away. Between you and the mountain is 40 miles worth of haze. I'm posting the original RAW digital negative file so you can see what I am talking about.  Getting anything worth looking at from these pictures would turn out to be a massive salvage operation, more so even than other days in this project.

Thankfully, I did manage squeeze a little something out of what little I had. It took another crash Photoshop course, and did lot of experimenting, and starting over, and more experimenting. But, I ended up getting something worth keeping and we wouldn’t see the mountain again the rest of the trip. I wonder if that poor guy from back in 1996 ever got to see it...

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Alaska Day 7 - College Fjord

Calving, Harvard, Glacier, College Fjord Alaska, originally uploaded by jsevier14.

Just before the first time Missy and I went to Alaska I bought my first serious camera. In fact, I think this was the first camera I ever bought for myself. I had a nice Minolta point and shoot I received as a Christmas gift. But I’d always wanted to get into Photography and this trip seemed like the perfect excuse.

On that trip, I shot 23 rolls of 35mm Kodak negative film. If you figure 37 pictures per roll, that added up to 851 pictures. I bagged a deal at Kroger, had them developed, and of those 851 pictures, exactly 1 of them was worth keeping. One.

So here on this trip I found myself nearly exactly in the same spot where that picture from the first trip was made. The first time I was there, we had a way better day for shooting. Crystal clear, bright blue sky, and if you strain, you will see the moon rising over the hills there. This time around in College Fjord, the sun was nowhere to be found. It was cloudier even than the day before at Glacier Bay.

College Fjord is not too far away from Anchorage, by air. It is dead in the middle of Prince William Sound, and it was the last sightseeing stop we would make before we disembarked excruciatingly early the next morning. The ship got to College Fjord early in the afternoon after passing Bligh Reef, the spot where 21 years prior an Exxon ship deposited 11 million of gallons of crude into those very waters. The spill covered an area the size of Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined. The oil contaminated fishing waters over a 10,000 square miles, certainly including the area I photographed on this day.

College Fjord essentially two big glaciers, Harvard and Yale, then a bunch of little glaciers that mark the landscape as you cruise through the narrowed Port Wells arm off the sound.

The forest intermingles more with the glaciers here. Where Glacier Bay is relatively new in terms of geology, having been formed by recent melting of the glacial ice, College Fjord is much older. The coastline is heavily forested, except for the glacial paths, which long ago uprooted any growth that might have been there.

I spent this sightseeing trip on our own balcony. This turned out to be a much better shooting vantage point. Toward the end of our visit within a mile of Harvard Glacier, the ship’s captain executed a full 360 degree turn right in the middle of the sound. The turnabout made for a brilliant panorama opportunity, and I certainly took advantage of it. Because of the way I’ve chosen to upload these, with the best images in small groups first, the panoramas will have to wait until I am done with the entire trip. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, the dark cloudy conditions and later afternoon light brought the blue hues in the Harvard Glacier ice out a little bit more than Glacier Bay…

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Alaska Day 6 - Glacier Bay National Park

Margerie Glacier, Tarr Inlet, Glacier Bay National Park, originally uploaded by jsevier14.

I sat down to prep these for publishing and as I reviewed the all too wordy and flowery draft version of this blog, I realized that entry was created about a year ago today. The first line reads “I’ve been working on these glaciers since the last week of September. It’s December now. So, it took me several months to get these done.” That’s December of last year, when I wrote it.


These pictures without a little crafting were flatly awful, so I spent the better part of three months taking pictures that looked like this…

...and turning them in to this:

So, aside from my other photographic work, this day and several other similar efforts are what took the bulk of the time I needed to get these done.

We got to Glacier Bay on a cloudy, dark, almost depressingly cold day. It was not a good day for picture-taking. These Alaskan glaciers are big, complex sheets of jagged blue ice. They have all sorts of textures, and because of that, they tend to have deep shadows, especially on a cloudy day.

Glacier Bay’s headquarters and lodge are somewhere just north of the little town of Gustavus, population 429. If you wanted to make a vacation of Glacier Bay, this is where you would find Beds and Breakfast, or maybe an Inn, or you could always stay at the Park’s Lodge. If you’re a glacier fan and want to get up close and personal with them, then a cruise is not for you. Staying in Gustavus or the park is. You can get a guide, charter a boat tour, or just hike on your own.

The area was discovered by Vancouver in the middle of the 18th Century, but it was completely frozen over and impassable and he skipped on past it. The entire area that is now Glacier Bay was covered in one giant sheet of jagged, earth shaping ice. The ice flows reached all the way out to the aptly named Icy Strait, 53 miles away from Margerie Glacier, our viewing stop for the day. What Vancouver couldn’t have known at the time was that this ice was actually in the process of melting (well before the Industrial Revolution). By 1907, the ice had receded all those miles to Tarr Inlet, and the Margerie Glacier is what remains of it. The glacier is still receding, letting those calved ice chunks off every so often. The sound of calving ice is like distant thunder, following a loud crack. It rolls over the water and engulfs the surroundings all around. Very majestic, and humbling.

Except actually photographing a calving is nearly impossible. The glacier itself is 2 miles wide at the mouth here where we viewed it. It's also hundreds of feet high. So you watch, you hear the boom, then of course sound travels slower than light so you don't know where to really find it and by the time you get your camera up, oh, you missed it. I feel very lucky I got anything at all of these events.

Glaciers are made of compressed ice, built up over a very long time. The glacier ice itself is compressed to the point that it reflects only azure or sky blue light. As the seasons changed, and the air warmed up, earth would stain the top of the glacial ice, then a new layer of ice would come the next winter. This gives glaciers a striated appearance.

After we spent an hour or so exploring the glacier, we turned about and headed back for the Gulf. And that was it for the camera on this day. Or so I thought. After we turned around I packed the gear away and we started getting ready for the second formal dinner night. On our way to the evening’s entertainment, I wandered out onto the deck of the ship, simply to see what could be seen. Shortly I was running back to the room for my rig. At Missy’s encouragement, mind you.

I looked out over the Gulf of Alaska and saw still waters below and parting clouds above. The sun was low in the sky, but obscured by a cloud. Below it, a brilliant orange reflection spread across the horizon in a narrow band right where the water meets the sky. The immediate background was darkening, so the effect was even more stunning. It was as compelling a sunset as I’ve seen, and my camera was 4 decks and half a ship away from me. I only heard “Go get…” By the time she got to “...your camera” I was in a full sprint back to my room. Happily, I got back in plenty of time.

Go see Alaska Day 6 - Glacier Bay National Park here...

Alaska Day 5 - Skagway

Summit Lake, Dichromatic Lake, Klondike Highway, Alaska, originally uploaded by jsevier14.

At its birth, Skagway’s sudden appearance made it grim and lawless, full of gruff men prepping or returning from their 500 mile hike out the Chilkoot Trail to the goldfields in the Canadian Klondike region. Now, 110 years later, Skagway has become a great big Alaskan shopping Mall full of bright cheery vacationers. The Chilkoot Trail still exists, a 33 mile piece of it anyway, and hard core hikers use it for a recreational 3 day adventure. Modern Skagway stands as a blatant contrast to its past.

I thought Skagway would be a day of rest, really. Maybe some light shopping. Certainly plenty of picture taking… But, for the most part after the hectic day before in Juneau, it seemed like this would be a good day to just wander around.

You get off the ship and you’re greeted by vacationer graffiti made over the past few decades. Right at the bottom of our ramp was a big boulder stuck into the side of a mountain. It was painted blue, with the words:

“I’ve seen shops and mountains,
And roads that are pitty.
But now I must return
To my own home city.
When I get there I’ll tell them all
‘Skaguay is GREAT!’
I know ‘cause
I’ve been there
In ’78!”

The whole hillside is painted with these landmarks.

On past the walkway as we entered into Skagway, we were greeted by the Pullen Creek Fish Passage and Habitat Improvement Project, an extension of the Taiya Inlet Watershed meant to improve the habitat for the local salmon populations. My first trip here this water was teeming with salmon. I guess we were too early this time.

I didn’t know when I shot this old building what a prominent figure Jeff. Smith was in that past. I just thought it was a cool old building that has been preserved for over a century. But, the guy who operated this “Parlor” was a bit of a gentleman scoundrel. I’ll let you read about him here if you want, although I’ll have to say his funniest gag was selling $5 telegraph messages several years before telegraph service was actually set up for Skagway.

And really, what lawless, Wild West town full of desperate (in more ways than one) men would be complete without full service brothel? Seems every southeast Alaska town had one, and Skagway was no different.

This is the Red Onion, and an unknown tourist who looks none too happy to be part of my show. The Red Onion is now a simple tourist bar, again showing the contrast of modern sensibilities with those of the insulated and isolated untamed west around the turn of the last century.

This guy cracks me up… He almost looks guilty, doesn’t he?

Almost everywhere I went in Alaska there were dogs. Your own dog is a virtual requirement in these parts, it seems. I have plenty of dog pictures in these sets...

Puppies always seem to know how to work the crowd for a little extra attention...

I did a little walking off the beaten path and found surprisingly normal looking houses just a block away from the main street. Then there was a row of 1950’s Cadillacs parked alongside one of the streets, and no shortage of Alaskan pride. One odd thing I noticed is that the satellite dishes look like they’re pointed at the ground. I saw this everywhere up north. If you’re at the top of the planet you have to point your dishes downward to get a signal.

Shortly I met up with the crew, back over by the Days of ’98 theater on (aptly named) Broadway, the main drag in Skagway. While waiting there with Missy we met Charlie. A couple of shots of the building was all it took for Charlie to surmise my tourist status, so he began the sales pitch for a bus tour out the Klondike Highway, opposite the Skagway River, where on the opposite ridge rests what’s left of the White Pass & Yukon railroad, with its 3 and a half foot wide track and $100 per passenger tourist runs. Charlie’s a Seattle transplant, and spends his summers in Alaska working for the theater, where he sells tickets to shows, and the bus tours. I had no idea who this guy was, but, the more he talked to us, the friendlier he seemed, and the more interested in the trip I became. The bus was way better than the train. On the train, you can’t get off. The bus stops a few times. Bonus! Then there’s the fee, which was by comparison to other tours up there, a paltry $40 bucks… Another score! So why not? Well, Missy knew why not, and she and her mom went back to the ship for some R&R.

Pretty soon Charlie was writing up a ticket for Aunt Sharon and me.

I understand Missy and her mom caught a movie while Aunt Sharon and me shared the bus with another whole family of mom, dad, two rock throwing maniac pre-adolescent boys, and two older kids who just seemed way above this sort of kitschy touristy nonsense. One of them slept most of the trip. There's $40 well spent.

And a good decision to go it was it was once I settled that some horrible unplanned fate did not await us. My neurosis led me back across the street to the little cookie stand where earlier I had scarfed what easily has to be the world best chocolate chip cookies. The lady that ran the stand seemed trustworthy enough, and when she explained the rules of tourist engagement in Skagway, my little silly fears about returning late or being left for dead someone in western Canada were permanently laid to rest. I mean, if someone with cookie-making-skills like that vouches for Charlie, that’s good enough for me! And seriously, these were the best chocolate chip cookies I ever ate. Warm, gooey, still melting chocolate chips… Wow.

And so me, Aunt Sharon, and The Obnoxious Family piled in the bus driven by Dave, a player in the Days of 98 Theater who hangs out in the offseason and, of all things spends his Alaskan winters working construction…

We all headed north toward the Continental Divide and the Canadian border. You can imagine the scenery. And he did stop as promised, many more times than I anticipated, so you don’t have to completely imagine it. We saw Dall Sheep...

...Pitchfork Falls, which is actually runoff from a hilltop lake called “Goat Lake,” which provides all the electricity needed by Skagway and a neighboring town… 

Then there was the Fairweather Fault, where we crossed the Moore’s Creek Bridge, a rare Single Point Cable Stay Cantilever Suspension Bridge, which is constructed such that if there is an Earthquake along the fault, the entire bridge structure will disconnect from the far side, saving it from collapse…

This was one of those moments where I saw the bridge approaching, and I one of my favorite photographic subjects is bridges, so I immediately started wishing we could stop.  We drove over it, went on our way, and then Dave stopped right in the perfect spot for me to shoot.  Of course I couldn't get off the bus fast enough.


Then there was the dichromatic Summit Lake, colored such because on half of it is full of glacial silt (pictured above). On the way back we stopped long enough for me to get a shot looking back northward along the Klondike Highway. Those poles off to the side of the road… Those are not lights. Those are guides for snow plows so they know where to go when the snow piles up, sometimes as high as these poles.

Go see Alaska Day 5 - Skagway here...

Alaska Day 4 - Juneau

Devil's Club, Mendenhall Glacier Trail, Tongass National Forest, Juneau, Alaska

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.

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...