The tour guide grew up in Juneau and had several good stories about life in Juneau. His uncle once caught a 300 pound halibut which was too big to fit into the boat he was using. He had to very slowly tow the fish into the harbor. Several families lived off the meat of that one fish for an entire year. Our tour took us on a high speed catamaran out to the Inland Passage to look for whales. We saw a pod of orcas and several humpback whales. The weather wasn’t great for sightseeing, but we did see some glaciers.
The Mendenhall Glacier is within 15 minutes of downtown Juneau. It was very foggy, so our view of the glacier was somewhat limited. There was a good size iceberg in the moraine lake and an interesting visitor center. We were given an hour for the visit, which initially I thought was rather rushed. However, after walking around in the cold rain for about 30 minutes, I decided it was just the right amount of time.
We had some time to walk around Juneau, so we passed up the 44 jewelry stores (really!) and wandered down the historic section. We had lunch at the Red Dog Saloon which is a tourist trap known for the Wyatt Earp gun which was supposedly left behind by Wyatt on his way through town. The country western singer was quite good and the lunch was adequate, but it is definitely a tourist trap. The downtown area is a big cruise ship tourist area with store after store of souvenirs made in China or Indonesia. We quickly tired of it and returned to the ship.
The ship left Juneau and returned to the Inland Passage. We had some interesting commentary over the PA system as we passed by an old lighthouse and entered the Lynn Canal, the deepest fjord (over 2,000 feet) in Northern America.
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| Leaving Auka Bay, we saw lots of private boats - the residents of Juneau like their fishing. |
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| Another high speed catamaran. This makes for a very smooth ride and lets us go further on our tours. |
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| The clouds lowered later, but here we had a good view of the mountain range in British Columbia. |
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| Point Retreat Lighthouse, located on Admiralty Island, is one of 10 lighthouses built on the Inside Passage. |
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| The tour boat captain found a pod or family of orcas. We followed them for quite a while and were treated to a show. |
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| Orcas aren't huge, but big enough, I'm thinking. I would be pretty nervous if I encountered one while in a small boat. |
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| A side benefit of the whale cruise was seeing more glaciers like this one. |
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| Saw two or three different humpback whales. |
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| Eagles were everywhere. This is a nesting pair, out getting food for their young ones. |
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| The picture doesn't do justice to the blue of this iceberg in the moraine lake formed by Mendenhall Glacier. The blue indicates that this ice is very old and has been super compressed. |
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| Mendenhall Glacier has a very large waterfall, the water comes from under the glacier. |
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| It was as cold and rainy as it looks. We managed pretty well, but I was glad to get back to the visitor center. There was a dramatic temperature drop from the visitor center out to this view point - a distance of about a third of a mile. The guide said that temps are always 15 degrees cooler at the glacier than in downtown which is 15 minutes away. |
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| Some of Juneau's buildings retained their Victorian charm, but others were just concrete blocks. The state is in the midst of replacing their capitol building - for eight years in a row it was voted the ugliest capitol building in the U.S. |
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| The Red Dog Saloon was full of touristy decorations - I thought this one was actually pretty funny. |
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| Russ had walked quite a bit in Juneau so he was happy to rest a bit with his new buddy. |
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