August 3, Day 4, Tracy Arm Fiord and Juneau, Alaska found Sharon and I waking up…at 6am…to some very beautiful scenery as the ship entered Tracy Arm Fiord. The ship cruised very slowly to the end of the fiord where we got a great look at Sawyer Glacier, up close and personal. We couldn’t go all the way up to the glacier due to huge chunks of ice in the water, some as large as 4 tons. Only about 19% of the iceberg shows above the water line, so the pictures don’t really tell the story.
Once we traveled down the fiord as far as we could, the ship’s captain did an amazing thing…turned the ship 180 degrees on a dime. These newer ships have thrusters forward and aft which can move the ship sideways…always handy when trying to dock the ship in port. In this case, the captain used the forward thrusters on the starboard side…pretty cool I can talk ship…to push the nose around and at the aft used the port thrusters. Slowly, but surely the ship turned counter-clockwise until we were pointed back down the fiord the way we had come. The entire trip up and back took about 4 hours.
The ship was due to dock in Juneau at 2pm but actually got there early…about 1:30…but it took at least a half hour to get the ship situated at the dock. Our tour wasn’t scheduled until 3:15 so we just relaxed in the room until time to depart. We went down to deck 5 and walked down the gangway to the dock. Waiting there were several buses…some taking folks downtown Juneau and others taking people on various tours.
We headed off, through the town, towards the north side of the city to the Mendenhall Glacier. The bus driver was very informative and gave us a lot of history of the town and surrounding area. Juneau is the smallest state capital in the US with a population of only 32,000. The population lives in three primary areas…downtown, Mendenhall Valley and across the Gastineau Straight on Douglas Island.
Mendenhall Glacier was amazing to see. At one time 4,000 feet thick, the glacier is slowly receding…not melting…due to insufficient snow up on the glacier. In other words, the glacier “calves”, or breaks off, faster than it can accumulate. The ice is fairly dirty looking from afar due to the rocks and dirt it picks up along the way down to the water. The deeper ice is ice blue until it is exposed to the air then it turns clear. The Rangers said that as recently as the 1930’s the glacier was right next to the visitor’s center, which is now about 600 yards away. As the glacier has receded, it has left huge chunks sitting in Mendenhall Lake…apparently not moving away down the Mendenhall River. In the winter, the lake freezes over and the locals use it for recreation.
Our next stop was the Glacier Gardens. The history of this place is very interesting, but I don’t think I can tell the story sufficiently…at least not as interestingly as the guides did. These 20-something kids did a great job keeping the visitors entertained while simultaneously giving us a little history of the area, lots of details about the rain forest and the town of Juneau. The short version of how Glacier Gardens got started is that the owners of a nearby nursery wanted to expand so they purchased the property next door and the husband started clearing some of the land with a newly rented $250,000 excavator. Apparently, this guy was really accident-prone, especially when it came to machinery, and as you might guess, his bad luck kept up. He backed into a log and caused $4000 worth of damage to the engine. At this point his anger got the better of him and he started grabbing trees with the machine and stabbing them into the ground upside down.
Sometime in the process he had a brainstorm…these upside down trees might be interesting for people to see…and they might pay. He tried to play up this brainstorm to his wife and downplay the expensive repair bill, but that didn’t work.
Anyway, about 10 years later, they opened Glacier Gardens on 50 acres of beautiful temperate rainforest with the beautifully designed “upside down trees” as a centerpiece. They built a road up to one of the lower peaks of the mountain…580 feet…and a deck overlooking the Gastineau Straights below. They added a few carts to carry the people up, a few guides and they were in business. Our guides were great…both entertaining and educational.
On the way back to the ship, the driver dropped us off downtown in the touristy shopping area and we wandered around a while before heading back to the ship, including a window shopping stop at the local Harley store…and, oh yeah, we purchased Sharon some diamond studs for her 40th anniversary present.
The ship pulled out of Juneau about 10pm and is headed for Skagway through a very dark ocean…ETA 6am, August 4.
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