Alaska 2017 Larry & Bev

At Sea to College Fjord We left the inland passage last evening and will be sailing in the Pacific until about 6 pm today when we arrive at College Fjord for views of the 16 tidewater glaciers.   Throughout the day we had great sailing weather with clear blue skies.   Around noon we could see that portion of the shoreline where we would be entering Prince William Sound.   It was rather distinctive, because all the mountains were covered in snow.  In fact, the snow was new snow from last week when the prior cruise had fog and rain.   As we entered the Sound, the scenery got just spectacular – snow-covered, 12,000+ft mountains above the water with the blue sky.   At 2:30 pm we went to the wine tasting, which provided some activity in the day of sailing. We entered College Fjord around 4 pm and for several hours we had views that were just unbelievable.  Our first glacier was the tidewater Cascade Glacier. Then we had views of ...

Glacier Bay, A Dynamic Wilderness Overnight we sailed toward Glacier Bay and arrived at 6 am to Bartlett Cove to take on board the Glacier Bay National Park park ranger for the day.   Although a couple of hundred years ago the entire bay was a huge glacier (100 miles long and thousands of feet deep), today the glacier is gone and what remains is a dozen tide water glaciers at the heads of their inlets in the upper bay.   The tallest peak is 15,300 ft (Mt. Fairweather) in the Fairweather Range.   The glaciers we will see flow from the Brady Icefield that caps the Fearweather Range.   The 600,000 acres of Glacier Bay NP are a federally protected marine ecosystems.   No roads lead to the park and the park is reached by either boat or air with most arriving on cruise ships.   Within the Park are fifteen tidewater glaciers.   Today we will see the Margerie, Grand Pacific, Lamplugh, and Johns Hopkins Glaciers.   Declared a national monument i...

Skagway and Train to the Yukon The ship docked about an hour later than originally scheduled, which changed our disembarkation time by about 30 minutes.   By 8 am, we were in the line for the motor coach, which takes us to the White Pass and Yukon Route RR station in Skagway.   The narrow gauge line dates back to the Yukon Gold Rush beginning 120 miles of track in 1898 and finishing 2 years and 2 months later   on July 29 1900.   It climbs almost 3,000 feet at the summit in just 20 miles and has steep grades of almost 3.9%.   After the gold rush ended the railroad was still used to carry ore and concentrates to Skagway for loading onto ore ships.   It played a role in WWII by serving as a supplier for the US Army’s Alaska Highway construction project.   After shutting down in the 1980’s due to the plummeting prices of metal prices, it reinvented itself in 1988 as a tourist attraction that it is today to transport visitors between Skagway and...