Friday, August 4

Today was the second of four days on this trip when I particularly hope(d) for good weather. The first, at Denali NP, was perfect and so was today (I will have to wait and see about the 7th and 21st of August). There were a few clouds in the sky when I boarded the Captain Cook for the eleven hour tour to Tracy Arm Fjord but they were gone when we arrived. Six scenic hours were spent sailing through the Inside Passage to and from Tracy Arm, which is 45 miles south of Juneau, but the five hours in the fjord were spectacular. I will let a few of the 97 photos I took give you an impression of what sailing along the fjord is like although they are a pale impersonation of the actual experience.

At the end of the fjord there remains a small part of the massive glacier that created it, called the Sawyer Glacier, which gave us a chance to see some ice calving.

The boat was very comfortable and the captain allowed passengers to join her on the bridge as long as you obeyed the following rules.

Here is an example of a significant iceberg but there were hundreds of smaller ones that had to be avoided.
These are some views along the fjord as it twists and turns over a distance of 30 miles.
When we were still a half mile away from the glacier a significant section of ice on the right end calved and fell in what sounded like an explosion. Unfortunately, although I watched it from the bridge,  I didn’t catch it on video. I did catch some subsequent calving from the same area. Watch the right side in full screen mode.

Saturday, August 5

My time in Juneau is done and I caught a flight back to Anchorage to resume the road trip. The only flight I could get was in the middle of the day which meant little else would fit in. I was not able to get a window seat on the “good” side of the plane and the views returning to Anchorage were difficult to see because the sun was shining from that direction but they were still beautiful.

I arrived in Anchorage around 3:30 and took a short detour to Earthquake Park, near the airport, which was one of the few things that attracted my attention in Anchorage itself. It is located at a section of Anchorage that collapsed into Cook Inlet when the strongest earthquake measured in the 20th century, a 9.2, occurred near here in 1964. Apart from a monument and information there was little to see as the area has been allowed to grow as a dense forest.

The shortest road video I have ever published, from Anchorage Airport to my hotel, is here.

The view of Glacier Bay National Park from almost 25,000 feet.

The Earthquake Park monument.