Floatplane ride in Juneau, Alaska

The pics are in backwards so please bear with me : { It'd be best if you scrolled to the bottom and worked your way up in order to follow my story....sorry!


This is our ship as we arrived back in Juneau. We sailed with Celebrity Cruise Line on the Infinity. It held 900 staff members and about 800 passengers. And Phil, they had 125 chefs on board who cooked 24/7 preparing 10,000 dishes over this trip. : }

These are just a couple of pics of the beautiful flowers we saw around Juneau.

And this is the view we saw as we headed back to Juneau. What an awesome experience!!

Soooo while we are eating our luscious salmon, a black bear just saunters out of the woods. I guess he smelled the salmon on the grill. Bears can smell things 2 miles away! He calmly walks into the yard, onto the patio and climbs up INTO the fire pit and begins licking the hot grates. EVERYONE jumped up and began snapping pictures. You don't see a bear in your BBQ very often!! : }

Inside the 100 year old cabin getting in line for dinner serving.

This is the cabin where our dinner was waiting...yuummmm : }

Landing!

Here we are coming in for a landing on Taku Island. One family owns this land and have a cabin there that they hire out as a tourist sight for salmon dinners. 8 young men and women come here in March and stay until October working this cabin. They grilled salmon for us that was less than 36 hours old and it was scrumptious. The best salmon I have "ever" had.

Another Silt water view

This is where we are circling getting ready to land on Taku Island. The glacier is just RIGHT THERE!! Notice the color of the water. It is sort of a grey/tan milky color called Silt caused from all the mineral melting off the glacier. Fish are able to live in this water, fishermen are just unable to see them.

Here it is as it crawls up onto the land. Kinda scary!

This is a glacier up close and personal. Look at the striated lineage of it. The weather elements causes it to look like this. Totally ice and extremely difficult to walk on although animal tracks have been seen and documented.

The next few pics are views out our plane windows...views that just about blow you away - awesome Lord!

As we took off, we got a great view of our ship in dock.

Dad and I are in line waiting to board our float plane. Steve went with us and Marjean decided to spend the time at the spa and shopping in town. So the plan was to fly us over 5 different glaciers, arrive at Taku Island at a 100 year old cabin where they are preparing a frilled salmon dinner for us, then on a short hike around the property. Fun!

The flowers around town were beautiful and we had to take pics of them and show you.

This is Juneau, Alaska, the capitol. Very quaint and lots of tourists from the ships which is their main source of income.

Tracy Arm Fjord in Alaskan Gulf

Tracey Arm Fjord [pronounced Forge] is an area carved along the Alaskan border by the ice glaciers. So the next pic's will mostly be scenic as we travel north towards Juneau, Alaska, our next port. Below is dad, the one holding the huge camera with Steve standing next to him on the right. One man actually stopped taking pictures, gave dad his business card and asked him to please just send him all the pics he takes : } I know in just one day, dad took 600 pics. Heaven knows how many he took over the entire trip : } This portion of the trip was the coldest as you can tell by the floating ice and how we're dressed.
Really look at this picture to see the gorgeous mountains in the background. That's a glacier coming down the mountains in the middle!
Ginormous, as Noey would say : } While the guys were out in the wind and cold taking pictures, Marjean and I decided to go to the 101: wine class. It as so much fun tasting and learning. Check out the window. This is what we could see as we sipped on wine"s"!! Look at the ice floating in the water! Marjean and I hung out on the 11th floor deck [very top] and watched the views from there instead of out in the cold. We did take a break from all our relaxing and brought the guys some hot cocoa down on the 5th deck "outside" : }
Great pic of Marjean and Steve!

And of course you all know who this is : } Check out the color of the water!

Dad just happened to spot the whirl pool as we were passing by. Cool!

We'd pass water falls along the way and this was the largest one we encountered.
It rains alot up here and the people count on it for total their water sources. I think I heard that it rained about 31feet a year....that's just down right crazy : }

Get a load of the color of this ice! The more clear it is, the older it is! So when you see white in ice, that the O2 bubbles in it and its pretty young.

Look closely....you may need to blow this pic up. See it? It's a black bear on the beach. Steve spotted it from the ship and dad was lucky enough to capture a pic of it.

These little playful guys were having so much fun with each other - sea otters! We counted 5!

So this was the path we took, right through all the floating ice. It was magnificently beautiful! God is so creative and such an artist. His talents "never" end.

Look at that glacier slowly crawling down the mountain.

You can see the glacier from a distance in the center of the mountains. See its horizontal silhouette?

Following are just a few pics that really make a statement of the Alaskan beauty!

Sea Kayaking in the Alaskan Gulf

The first expedition we went on was Sea Kayaking off the Ketchikan shore in the Gulf of Alaska. Cool!!! We saw 13 bald headed eagles [I counted]. We were able to get as close as I've "ever" been to an eagle. The water was about 52degrees, calm and just a gorgeous day to be doing this.
Here we are heading out into the ocean. Isn't that such an adventurous thought! : }

Dad was in heaven and I'm so happy that I like to do things like this too. He does introduce adventures to me that I probably wouldn't have even thought about : }
This was the beach we were dropped off on and met our 2 guides. We got to chose our own kayak after we listened to pretty brief instructions.
The small dingy [blue boat] is what we were brought out to this island in. It took us about a 10-15" boat ride to get out here.
These next pics are of the eagles we saw while kayaking. So majestic!
This is an adolescent eagle. You can tell by his feather colors. They don't get the white head until about 4 years of age. This little guy still lives in the nest and has not taken his first flight yet. Some eagle nests can be 8' deep and 24' across because eagles come back to the same nest every year and keep adding to it to kind of remodel their home each year. So the little eaglets have plenty of room to run around and play. They choose a nesting place that is high [of course] but also one that has many exit avenues for escape if needed. As the eaglets grow and prepare to leave the nest, the parents continue bringing food but place it farther and farther out of the nest on the branches making the little ones come out of their comfort zone and begin learning balance and little flites as they jump around from branch to branch See the nest behind and sort of below him.

Can you see this bald headed eagle in the bottom right corner and his nest in the upper left corner? Once we became accustomed to what we were looking for, we were able to spot the eagle a lot easier.