Juneau
The previous entry is Ketchikan.
June 1
This was the first day that we went totally nuts with the picture-taking, running through one 1GB card and well into the second one. We had an exciting shore excursion scheduled in the morning — a helicopter landing on the Mendenhall Glacier just outside of Juneau — along with an unplanned busride back to the glacier in the late afternoon.
Friends who had gone to Alaska before had said the helicopter ride was the highlight of their trip, so we made sure to reserve our seats well before we boarded the ship. A bus took us from the docks to the Juneau International Airport (“international” because there are flights to Canada), passing through a somewhat unremarkable downtown along the way. After an orientation on what to expect on the glacier and a demonstration on how to put on glacier boots (thick rubber boots with chains for traction), we waited for the helicopters, which were more-or-less running continuous shuttles from the airport to the glacier. Each copter carried six people (seated according to size and weight) plus the pilot, and the tour sends out groups of four or five copters at a time.
We had remarkably lucky weather. This weather luck would last through the entire trip: lots of sun and almost every day without rain, until the very last day when we were on the train to Anchorage from Denali. Our guides have already said that they’re surprised by the lack of rain, as Southeast Alaska is a temperate rain forest, getting hundreds of inches of rain a year. We brought rain ponchos with us from Wal-Mart, and they were never opened. The glacier itself was overcast, but not too cold, and, from the air, we could see miles and miles. The helicopter ride itself was smooth, going far past the face of the glacier up the ravine to show various glacial features, before heading back near the wall to set down on a plain of ice off to the side of the main flow.
A glacier is defined as a body of ice that moves under its own weight, flowing forward a couple of feet a day, but also melting off at its face, so that there’s actually a net loss (for almost all glaciers during this era of global warming) of a few inches per day. Mendenhall is a river of highly compressed ice about a mile wide and many hundreds of feet thick. Huge, patterned cracks have formed in its surface from its own weight and from the chaotic process of melting and refreezing on the surface: there’s no sense of scale from the air as you fly over the ice field. Those crevasses are dozens of feet wide, and what looks like peebly rocks on the surface are boulders the size of houses. We landed on a flat plain that’s basically an eddy in this river, a bowl surrounded by stone walls.
The tour has a small camp set up which they maintain for the season. There’s a tent for the comfort of the guides and designated spots in a semi-circle for the helicopters to land. There’s a dormant copter off to the size, presumably to fly someone out in an emergency. After debarking from the copters — close to the copter is safe, far away is safe, right around the circle of the blades where the blades might tip down is not safe — we were given a little nature talk about what we’re seeing on the glacier.
There were no crevasses here, so we could walk around without any danger of falling into a deep pit. The surface was hard and sharp: if you fall on bare skin, you’ll cut yourself. There was black grit everywhere, the residue of boulders ground to dust by the moving ice long ago. The guides noted that a lot of people are surprised by how “dirty” the ice is, perhaps expecting pristine fields of white. There were also columns of liquid water that have pushed to the surface from a melted layer hundreds of feet below. If the conditions are right, there are occassional geysers, but none that day. Instead, we saw plate sized holes that burrow deep into the glacier, some of them filled with clear water. Water on the glacier is a vivid light blue, so vivid it doesn’t seem natural, as if a prankster had bombed the field with packets of the stuff that comes out of the Day-Glo factories. The color is from the very dense ice: all the air is squeezed out so that only pure blue light is scattered back.
As from the air, there was no sense of scale on the ground. The plain we were on stretches for at least half a mile from the small camp to the cliffs. The frozen waterfall in the background was actually as tall as the Empire State Building, and what looked like shrubs from where we were standing were fully grown trees. The guides said we could walk around, but there was no point in trying to walk to the edge of the plain: you can’t make it there before the helicopters get back for the return trip.
On the way back, we took a slightly different route, heading south over the low mountains before heading to the airport. We did see a small group of hikers climbing through the crevasses themselves, little ants on a vast landscape. (During dinner, we found out that one of the couples at our table did that tour later in the day.) Over one of the ridges, we saw our first glimpse of Dall Sheep working their way over the rises.
There were some eagles lounging in a roadside culvert as we took the bus back to the docks. The bus driver noted that, so unlike their majestic image, bald eagles will take a meal any way they can get it, and that there’s a landfill on the other side of those trees. It’s just buffet dining to them. Eagles, it was noted, are kind of like pigeons in some parts of Alaska. The driver also recommended taking one of the $5 buses to the Parks Service center near the face of the glacier. I believe the Lonely Planet guide states that there’s also a Juneau city bus that runs to the same place for $1.50, but didnt’ specify where to pick it up.
We had a second shore excursion scheduled for the day. Onboard, we had realized that the glacier landing excursion was pretty early in the day, and that they ship wouldn’t leave until dinnertime. From brochure, the Alaskan Salmon Bake seemed to be the most reasonable: it’s be right after the helicopter tour, and didn’t seem as silly as panning for gold or as similar to other excursions we were scheduled to take as some of the wildlife tours. The food at the bake was decent, but the salmon was actually a bit disappointing. For some reason, we found their baked beans and corn bread much better. Near the salmon bake was an abandoned gold mine — there was actually a gold panning tour not too far from the bake — near one of the innumerable springtime waterfalls in Alaska, as the mountain snowmelt seeks the sea. We got back to downtown Juneau by mid-afternoon, and saw the ticket offices for one of the buses to Mendenhall.
The Parks Service station offered a different view of the glacier. The main photography points were situated across the lake formed by the glacier melt, and there were hiking trails leading towards other vantage points. We followed one of those trails, along with dozens of other people — we realized later that it probably wasn’t one of the official trails, merely a path through the bushes that had been beaten out by adventurous photo-seekers, and that the Parks Service probably would have kept us from going down that path if we had stopped at the building first. It was a mile of walking through bushes and over rocks near the lakeshore and ended on a sandy beach formed by glacial silt. At the beach was a waterfall we saw from the Parks Service building — we were at the foot of it — and still some distance away from the glacier wall. While walking this trail, we heard a noise like thunder or like cannonfire every once in a while: the sound of unimaginable large amounts of ice cracking. Our earlier guides had told us to look towards the glacier if we heard that sound: we may see ice calving off the glacier face into the lake. But we saw nothing, and the noises we heard that afternoon were probably caused by shifts in the ice deep in the glacier.
There was still no sense of scale regarding the glacier face, until we saw a canoe tour going close to face on the lake. And that canoe was still some distance away, working its way among the icebergs that result from calving. Overhead, we saw helicopters fly by: the glacier landing tours would continue late into the evening.
There were still some hours left in Juneau before we boarded the ship, so we wandered through the tourist and residential stores in downtown. There were sightseeing rides up the mountain in a tram, as well as various coffee places (we had yet to see a Starbuck’s in Alaska). And there were eagles overhead again, wheeling slowly over the city with their straight wings. This time, I had the camera and long lens ready and spent some fifty shutterclicks trying to get a clear shot while Grace was in the souvenir store. Some passing knots of other tourists wonder what’s going on and also look up — I didn’t notice any locals, but I’m sure the sight of cameras pointed skywards is merely another sign of spring and summer to them — but my lens is bigger and I got my shots in at the dots in the sky. That’s one of the wonders of digital: I can blow the equivalent of two rolls of film to get that handful of pictures that aren’t fuzzy, and not think about it.
The next stop is Skagway.