I'll end this week with some more back water pictures. I loved this day of the trip. This area was so full of visual interest.

Some back water shots. It was a misty quite day and I was so relaxed.

On the way out of Glacier Bay we see one more from a distant then back into the open water. It was a rough day at sea on the return but it only lasted one day and one night. My sea sickness was minor and actually added to the excitement of the trip.

This glacier is very much a live. You hear the ice crack and every once in a while you hear a thunderous boom and see a chunk of ice the size of a house come sliding down into the frigid waters. Yes the last picture has a kayak in it.

In the last picture on Friday I said there were two glaciers. You may be scratching your head thinking I see the one on the left but all I see on the right is a trash heap. Well that trash heap is a glacier trash heap. It is a "dead" glacier. It is no longer moving so as it melts all the material it has gathered on its trip from the valley summit is exposed. Here is a closer look.

Moving on to where we will get to see more Glaciers which I’ll post a ton of shots of next week. The last picture in this series shows you two different types of glaciers which I'll tell you about latter. Can you see both of them?

Getting to the end of the train ride we passed this caboose which you can rent if you so choose. I didn’t post the picture of the girl who we picked up high in the mountains. She had dropped of an earlier train and hiked the highlands. The train will pick you up if you choose to ride back down but you have to make it to a place where the train can stop. Honestly, I only saw one such place.

This first picture was taken after we had traversed that bridge. Yea it is rickety and look at the heights traveled by those men and their pack animals! The mountain rivers look so harmonious with the scenes but imagine having to cross those icy waters in a time where rain gear designed to shed rain more than keep you dry.

These pictures where taken just after leaving the train station and as you can see the land is extremely steep and the curves on this “narrow” gauged train line are sharp. Yes that is the front of the train we are riding. I would have gotten out on the landing but it was already packed with people and they didn’t seem to care about their own safety not to mention those they where pushing around to get their shots. I played it safe and took pictures from inside the car.

Why I didn't take a picture of our train as it was loading, I don't know. I guess I wasn't inspired by the scene. But these four shots are from the train. The first two show you how narrow the trail was going from the coast to the gold rush area. This was a two way trail. It is only a couple of feet wide. The story goes that if you fell out of line you could be hours waiting for someone to give you a chance to get back in. At the top of this trial was a place where dead pack animals where piled up in the hundreds. The Canadians said the prospectors had to have enough gear and food to help them survive and the weight of that gear was over 2000 lbs. The clime up through these mountains was just too hard on pack animals who where not treated or fed well. The real shame is of the thousands of prospectors who attempted this Rush only a few found any gold and only a few of those found enough to have made it worth their while. Greed for quick riches and the disregard for one's own ignorance about what would be a dangerous and devastating try helps me to understand why nations prefer war to diplomacy so often in human history.

This portion of the trip back we were still on the bus heading to the point where we would meet the train and finish the return by rail. But I was just amazed at the volume of rock in this part of the country. Not stones or boulders, but big huge mountains of rock.

On the way back to the coast we stopped in Carcross. I'm not sure what industry keeps this town alive but they did have a Mounty Station.

You've heard of Emeral Lake? Here it is.

Due to a high volume of activity at the office on Monday, I didn't get to post this for Tuesday so I'm fudging the post to look like it was. I had to be at the house on Tuesday and while it was a lot of work, I loved it. LOL

Here are some images from a small place in the Yukon that served BBQ chicken for lunch, raises a hybrid dog for dog sledding and has this stuffed animal museum. It was kind of cheesy. They put a couple of stuffed mountain goats up on the cliffs overlooking the place. Yea you can take a dog sled ride on a sled-on-wheels. I enjoyed this place. It kind of reminded me of the weird things one use to find on the back roads around Myrtle Beach. You know, the alligator pits and the freak museums with stuffed two headed calves, etc.

The sign tells it all.

I’ll end the week with the start of our excursion into Yukon Territory. We took a bus up White Pass across the boarder and stopped at this sign. While there this old fella (older than me) was trekking up this mountain road on his bike with all his gear. He wasn’t peddling as fast as I can walk but he was making it. The train picture was actually taking at the top of White Pass in British Columbia but I though it was a cool shot with it’s length and the background.

After visiting Mendenhall Glacier National Park we headed for a Salmon Bake. I was so looking forward to this part of the excursion. But I ended up a bit disappointed. First I was thinking that in a region that had so much Salmon that this would be a real treat with new and different ways of cooking the fish. Nope, it was just cooked over an open fire pit with nothing special done to it. OK, that was ok because it was good food. But then on the ride back we had a tour guide that told old bad jokes and little history of the area. This was especially disappointing because he was a native of the area. Still, it was a good excursion and there is something about eating fish on a rainy day in a rain forest that is really cool.

Our excursion out of Juneau was to Mendenhall Glacier National Park. As you can tell, the weather along the coastline is grey. I expected this because of my time spent in Monterey, California. This national park is interesting. There are two waterfalls and you will be able to take a trail to one of them but it is under construction right now. That didn’t stop a few adventurous folks in our tour group from heading out to it anyway. The second waterfalls coming out of the glacier use to be under the glacier. They say it’s rate of regress is a football field distance a year now. From the ebb and flow charts of glaciers I’ve been looking at this is not unusual at all but I’d strongly suggest you put a visit to a glacier area into your vacation plans soon as the may not be as grandiose in a few years.

Here are some shots taken around Juneau. For a State Capital, it isn't very interesting. The legislature meets in what use to be an elementary school. They say you can't reach Juneau by road, you have to fly or boat in. I've been asked by several people if I got to see the Governor. Nope. She didn't live in the Governor’s Mansion. She only came to town when it was a must situation. She says she sees no point in hanging around as a “Lame Duck” Governor. So much for respecting the folks of Alaska who put her in office. Bye the way, no one in any of the towns we visited cared to talk about her. It was almost as if she was the Governor of another state.

In this series of shots you get to see more blue ice but I've also added some shots with boats so you can get a bit of perspective of the size of both the icebergs and the mountains that are shooting straight up out of the water. The boat in the first two pictures is 48' long. the sail boat in the bottom two pictures is smaller but you can see the guy in the boat to get an idea of size.