Alaska 5: College Fjord, Whittier, Anchorage and home

Rather than draw it out any further, I'm piling the whole rest of the trip into this last episode. So buckle up your life preservers, and let's set sail!

On Friday, August 5, 2016, our cruise ship did our second day of "scenic cruising", this time through College Fjord ("Fyord").

It was a rainy, cloudy day, though, so we spent most of the day inside playing games.

Rainy day in College Fjord

There was a taco bar that day. I liked the watermelon head.

We watched a presentation about glaciers or something at 1pm. But we didn't last too long.

And well, then it was time for lunch, wasn't it? (Or was it second breakfast?) Here's Steven's traditional shake, pizza and ice cream spread.

Andra invented yet another virgin specialty drink.

We did see a whole bunch of pretty cool glaciers in College Fjord. The weather just made them a bit more subdued than what we had seen the day before.

So we mostly watched them pass by through the window as we sailed through College Fjord, while enjoying what I liked to call "Bjord games". Here the group is playing "Ripple".

While we were playing games, suddenly we saw some porpoises playing in the ship's wake. We all started yelling "Orcas off the port bow!" because that's what they looked like at first. But someone told us they were Pacific Dolphins (which are dark on top and white on the bottom). But really it appears we were both wrong, because they were most likely Dall's Porpoises. At any rate, it was really fun to see them playing in the waves like that. (I added music so you wouldn't have to listen to us flounder about whether they were Orcas or what).

Green mountains and waterfalls in College Fjord

Linette came outside with me to look at the glaciers. And she borrowed my coat, because it was freezing on the windy deck.

  

This whole area was infused with glaciers from every direction.

Panorama of several glaciers in College Fjord

The Glaciers in College Fjord are named after colleges. The biggest one, which we stopped at for a while, was Harvard Glacier. The black streaks in the middle are the "edges" of the various glaciers that all run together. You can faintly see them all in the background, coming down several different mountains to join forces at the bottom.

Harvard Glacier, College Fjord, Alaska

Since we stopped there, and it stopped raining, it was time for everyone to take a break from games and come take a selfie in front of Harvard Glacier.

As we saw many times in Alaska, the hillsides that weren't ice or rock were really green.

Close-up of left side of Harvard Glacier, College Fjord, Alaska

Right side of Harvard Glacier, College Fjord, Alaska

Popcorn time!

I believe this was the dinner where I got the full turkey dinner as an appetizer, followed by the pepper corn steak for dinner. It was our last dinner before we had to face reality again.

That last night we played games in an empty dining hall until midnight. I forget what embarrassed Linette so much, but I seemed to be in trouble for taking her picture at the time.

That night we arrived in Whittier, Alaska, at 12:02 a.m. (They had to wait until after midnight to avoid another day of docking fee).

Whittier, Alaska

Saturday, August 6, 2016, as we got ready to disembark just after breakfast, we bumped into the family we had met on the train to Vancouver, on our way to the ship, so we said good-bye to them.

We were among the last off the ship, but we took time for one last free fruity drink and pastry.

And then we pretended to be sad that it was over.

But we still had more adventures ahead of us that day!

Whittier

Andra helps produce a TV show called "Life Below Zero" for National Geographic about a lady who lives way up north in Alaska in the middle of nowhere. (In fact, in September 2016 they just won an Emmy for cinematography!). One of the guys she worked with on that show, Ben Houdek, runs a boat in Whittier, and so we arranged to go out with him on his little boat and see some more cool stuff.



There were waterfalls everywhere we turned.

And here's a video of that waterfall, showing how the seagulls were swarming all around it.

Did I mention that it was a long week?

It was rainy and misty that day, which made pictures a little tough, but also added a mystical, ethereal mood to what we saw.

The glaciers we saw weren't as huge as the ones we had seen the two days before, but we were able to get closer and look at them from water level, so it was still very impressive.

Here's a 30-second video where you can hear how the boat knocks against chunks of glacial ice as we go along.

We saw seals resting on floating glacier ice a few times.

We stayed inside the boat when we were moving fast, at least partly because of the rain outside.

Here is a waterfall fed by the glacier right above it.

I had this photo on my vertical monitor at work, and one with seals on my horizontal one, and one of my co-workers walked into our work area, glanced at my screens, and said, "...Or, we could look at Randy's screen and wish we were somewhere else!" I thought that was kind of funny. Sometimes the scenes make me a a bit nostalgic and distracted, too.

At Blackstone Glacier, we met up with some kayakers and delivered a "dry bag" to one of them.

Blackstone Glacier

Linette and Randy at Blackstone Glacier

Andra and Steve at Blackstone Glacier

Melissa Elmes at Blackstone Glacier

The ice floats lower in the water than normal ice that we're used to, because it is so dense from the immense pressure of the glaciers.

Randy and Linette at Blackstone Glacier

The pressure also squeezes all the air out, leaving the ice extremely clear. We had sodas from a cooler with glacier ice in it. I said, "Wow! Glacier-cooled root beer!" (as if that makes it colder or something :)

"Look at the size of that rock!"

Here's a close-up of this same glacier, showing the blue tint (and the rocky deposits from the glacier grinding on the mountain).
  

It was so fun to go by these seals. They watched us the whole way by.

Here we are approaching Bloit Glacier--somewhat slowly, due to the ice in the water. On the far right you can see kayakers.

Here we go a bit faster, only slowing when the ice gets too much in our way.

Bloit Glacier had some cool ice caves.

Bloit Glacier, near Whitter, Alaska

And it was amazing to see these spires of ice that had not yet crumbled down. (We didn't see any major calving events this day).

This waterfall (to the right of that same glacier) was somehow gushing horizontally. I don't know if it was coming down hard and being deflected, or if it was coming from underground.

Projectile waterfall at Bloit Glacier.

And this massive blue iceberg was cool. It appears to have been stranded on the shore with the tide.

I had to keep wiping rain off the lens.

Steve and Andra Duke, Steven and Melissa Elmes, and Linette and Randy Wilson.
Bloit Glacier, near Whittier, Alaska; August 6, 2016

Steve and Andra Duke, Bloit Glacier

This seal got nervous and bailed into the water as we passed by.

Then we got off at a beach to explore the shore for a minute. The boat had a D-Day amphibious assault-like ramp in its front.

The forest there was ridiculously green.

And we saw a scary witch enshrouded in moss! (Don't worry--she only comes alive at midnight on a full moon. When you don't obey your parents.)

And these plants are called "Devil's Club", and are ones you want to watch out for....

Devil's Club leaves

...because if you look close, they have nasty thorns that apparently are hard to get out.

Devil's Club thorns

The beach was amazing: It was entirely covered in perfect skipping rocks of all sizes!

Linette found a starfish on one of the larger skipping rocks. ("Shooting star!")

The trees apparently have a pretty hard time this close to shore.

When we got back to shore, we saw that someone was gutting a bunch of fish they had just caught. Apparently these are bottom-dwellers, so when they're brought up to the surface, the eyes bulge out and their stomachs pop out of their throats. Gross.

This house totally looked haunted, especially in the mist. So we ate lunch there. It was hard to pay real money for food when we had been getting it for "free" all week.

Whittier is separated from Anchorage by a big mountain, so transportation there is kind of tricky. All the reasonable transportation from the ship was only available in the morning. It turned out that the cheapest mode of transportation we could find in the afternoon was a limo. Then they messed up and had to send the stretch hummer limo for us. (We would have been fine in a mini-van).

So, off we went in an audacious vehicle.

"There's a party goin' on! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!"

Juneau

Andra took us to the office where her TV show has all their cold weather gear and stuff, so that she could introduce us to the guy there and show us around. She showed us the cool-looking snow boots they use in fairly cold weather (like -10), and the bulbous "bunny boots" that everyone in Alaska wears in really cold weather (like -50), as they're the only things that really work. I thought it was fun to see how people treated Andra like a big Hollywood producer.

Then we wandered around Anchorage and poked our heads into the shops and such.

I thought these were cute.

Linette is 1/16th Native American.

And we finally saw a bear!

There was a display that had the sun and planets built to scale.

We ate at the Duke's favorite restaurant in Anchorage.

Then we picked up our luggage to go to the airport. Suddenly we realized that there was a suitcase there that didn't belong to any of us. What!? We looked inside and saw an iPad and found a name. We realized that when the limo driver grabbed our suitcases from where we had stashed them at the boat company in Whittier, he had grabbed someone else's bag, too! So Andra called and arranged to have someone come and pick it up. (It turned out that the guy whose bag was missing was on an overnight kayaking trip and so would have it back before he knew it was gone.)

Our flight left just after midnight, which was crummy, but was the only flight available (until, somehow, the Childs found one later that was at 11am that day). Andra said the Anchorage airport was never busy, but apparently she hadn't ever seen it when a whole cruise ship needed to get home at the same time!

When we arrived at the airport, the security line went back this far:

and forward this far from the same point:

We asked the lady at the counter if we were going to make it, and she said the line moves faster than you'd think. We made it with 5 minutes to spare. That was close.

Meanwhile, that same day, Rob and Melissa Lym went hiking with Rob's old roommate, and saw some gorgeous scenery.

Then, as they were talking, they looked over, and suddenly they saw this "enormous moose" (as Melissa described it).

It looked up at them and started walking towards them, but somehow they were able to avoid a disastrous encounter.

And then, at the airport, they, too finally saw a bear.

It was an awesome trip. We sort of forgot to relax the whole time, and ended with an all-night pair of flights, so we ended up exhausted.

Alaska offered up a lot of amazing scenery. Thanks for having a look with us!

Interestingly, I have noticed since I have been home that if I open my eyes and look with the same curiosity that I did while on these trips, I see quite a few things that are as beautiful and breathtaking as much of what I saw elsewhere. I live at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, for Pete's sake! And every place has its own brand of beauty as well--the green, mossy forest in Oregon that my parent's home is nestled in; the amazing sunsets that Phoenix offers up on a regular basis to my brothers' families; the palm trees and nearby oceans of Brownsville where my other brother lives; and so on.

When I took a drawing class in college, I learned that art is much more about seeing than about drawing. And as we look around us and open our eyes to see, we will find beauty, and see God's hand in the nature around us. And if we look even closer, we can see beauty and goodness in the people around us, and find joy in our relationships with them.

Thanks again for joining us, and have a wonderful day!