Alaska: Juneau

A view of downtown Juneau from Douglas Island.

I flew into Juneau from Anchorage. I was there for just a little over two days, but got a good feel for the town by walking its streets, talking to the locals, and hiking in the surrounding mountains.



Downtown Juneau and surrounding peaks from the side of Mount Jumbo on Douglas Island.



A model of Juneau, the surrounding mountains, and the Juneau Ice Field. The red arrow shows the toe of Mendenhall Glacier.



Mendenhall Glacier


I went for a nice long hike up towards Mt. Roberts for a 360 degree view. It was a superb hike. Lots of elevation gain but beautiful forests (second-growth) at the lower elevations transitioning to flower-carpeted meadows and up higher - quite a bit of snow. Here is Gold Ridge shrouded in mist.



Mt. Roberts shrouded in mist. I started up this last bit of trail to the peak, but decided it wasn't a good idea - the snow was soft and didn't look very stable. The following day, I met a man on the trail up Mt. Jumbo who told me that the snow and ice up the last bit of Mt. Roberts was cracked in many places - not safe!



Mt. Jumbo (center) on Douglas Island, and the community of Douglas, which is a part of Juneau and connected to downtown by a bridge over the Gastineau Channel. Mt. Jumbo was a fantastic and scenic hike - highly recommended! This was taken from the hike up Mt. Roberts.


Juneau and Douglas started as gold mining towns. Looking up Gastineau Channel.


Looking down (south) the Gastineau Channel and the water and mountains of the Inside Passage. Beautiful!

Alaska: Kenai Peninsula

The flight from Seattle to Anchorage was maybe the most spectacularly scenic I have been on. I saw endless mountains, glaciers, ice fields. I saw extensive forests, little bays, wide rivers. I saw fog blanketing coastlines and rolling up the mouth of rivers. I saw things I recognized - like the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula. But most of the time, I had no idea where I was. That was all right; it was enough for me to know that beauty of this scope exists.



View of glaciers and mountains from plane.

After flying over the Chugach Mountains and then miles and miles of patterned mudflats that are part of the Cook Inlet, I landed in Anchorage and met up with James at the airport.

The next day, we started east on the Seward Highway towards the Kenai Peninsula. It was the fourth of July (!) and we wanted to check out the festivities in Girdwood, a resort town about thirty miles outside of Anchorage.

Apparently half of Anchorage had the same idea, so after a while on the congested local road that would lead to a jammed parking lot, we got out of there...Instead, we chose to spend a lovely afternoon hiking and lounging on a big boulder overlooking Bryons Glacier (right) and surroundings (mountains, glaciers, streams, waterfalls, lake, humans, canines).


We camped for a couple of nights at a Forest Service (FS) campground by Kenai Lake, about 15 miles north of Seward. Seward (Su-ward, or Sea-ward, in Janny lingo) was a fishing village with a cannery that now serves as a tourist base for adventures on sea and land because of its proximity to Kenai Fjords. It is beautiful there, rimmed by snowy peaks and Resurrection Bay. I'd like to kayak there some day.

Two memories of Seward will stick with me - the Moose Tracks I ate at the local creamery, and a drunken ramble by a local guy at the waterfront. The "conversation" started well enough - he offered us a beer, which we kindly declined, but then the tirade started. I think he was upset about these first and second generation "Alaskans" coming in and taking all the good paying jobs - like being a prison guard. I guess life has not been kind to him, and as we excused ourselves, I felt like giving him a much needed hug...but I did not act on that impulse. By the end of that, I could have used a hug myself!



Exit Glacier at Kenai Fjords National Park (NP)


Kenai Fjords NP encompasses much of the southeastern portion of the Kenai Peninsula, but only one area- Exit Glacier - is accessible by car. As national parks go, the infrastructure is extremely limited. Most people explore the spectacular coastline of the park by motorized boat or kayak. A few people backpack - it's all cross-country. There are no trails beyond the lovely hike up to the edge of the Harding Ice Field, which we did. The Harding Ice Field is a fifty square-mile chunk of ice at the heart of the park. A few crazies traverse it for fun. I understand the impulse to do something just because it's there, but hiking miles and miles on blinding ice and snow is not high on my list.

Looking out across the ice field, not being able to see the other side, I felt as if I was at the edge of the world.


Crevasses of Exit Glacier



The Harding Ice Field.


One of the "nunnataks" or "lonely ones"- isolated peaks breaking up the homogeneity of the ice field.















James, Exit Glacier, Resurrection River and its headwaters.



One night we camped at an Alaska State Park by the Kenai River near Soldotna. We took an evening walk by the river - a cold, clear, wild, beautiful specimen. The fish were jumping and the mosquito were biting: a classic Alaskan night!

Another night we camped at Anchor Point northwest of Homer and spent another laid-back evening strolling along the beach and watching the light change as the sun went down. There was a juvenile bald eagle taking food from some sea gulls. A couple of adult eagles were flying about. Clam diggers were probing the sands. It was cold and breezy and absolutely breath-taking.

Sunset at Anchor Point, ~11:30pm


Homer, Jewel's hometown, is a cute place - minus the RV parks desecrating Homer Spit. I had a delightful milkshake with fish and chips at the Spit. Mt. Redoubt and the peaks across the Cook Inlet, as well as those across Kachemak Bay, were totally or partially obscured by the smoky regional haze from several large wildlifes in the Kenai Peninsula and other parts of Alaska. The next day, we found it unpleasant to hike when it was so smoky.

The last hike we did on the Kenai Peninsula was along the Cook Inlet from the little town of Hope to a rock outcrop called Seagull Rock. The hike took us through beautiful paper birch forests alternating with conifer forests, sparkling little streams, and clearings of shrubs and wildflowers. Very nice.

The Start: Tetons and Glacier

A little over three weeks ago, with my Civic packed to the brim, I left Grand Junction, Colorado, a place I had called home for three years. It was a cool morning and I was feeling a mix of sadness, excitement, and many emotions in between. I was thinking about the friends I had made and the spots I had grown to appreciate and love in the desert. Greenday's got it right: it IS true that every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end...

TETONS
With my friend Nick on his motorcycle, who was joining me for the first leg of the trip up to Wyoming and Montana, we set off that morning with the day's destination being Grand Teton National Park near Jackson, WY. On the way, we passed exotic locales such as Vernal, UT, and Pinedale, WY - places I associated with people and stories I had heard the past few years. A definite highlight of the day's drive included Flaming Gorge (which dams the Green River) and the geology in the vicinity, which reminded me of the slickrock country in southcentral Utah. The drive roughly parallelled the Green River into Wyoming and its source - the Wind River Range, spectacular north-south trending mountains I would love to explore one day. Pinedale is an incredibly sprawly little town, but close to fantastic outdoor activities. The highway section between Pinedale and Jackson I was enthralled with. Cold clear river, majestic mountains, open space galore. A few bends down the road later and it was Jackson, jammed packed with people in shorts eating ice cream while rubbing giant antler arches and posing for pictures. I couldn't wait to get out of there, but highlights of the brief stop in town included chatting with a local girl in an art gallery about life in Jackson (how do people afford it??) and the public rest room, of which I was a fan. The cool thing about this rest room was the display of historic photos showing the town's roots as a ski spot. Apparently they couldn't turn with the old wooden skis, so they just went straight down the mountain! There were photos of women skiing in long heavy woolen dresses! I'm glad times have changed.

The Tetons were every bit as thrilling as imagined. We camped on Shadow Mountain (Forest Service) which looks out across the valley to the mountains. I woke up groggily around 5am and then every few minutes and saw the progression of sunrise on the Grand Teton - lovely! I briefly contemplated crawling out of my sleeping bag to get the camera, but that idea was quickly nixed. Heavy dews in the morning combined with condensation in my bivy sack soaked my sleeping bag. It took a while for things to dry out before carrying on. We spent several hours hiking up Cascade Canyon, starting at Jenny Lake. Not a hard hike (though longish - RT 12mi), but scenic with lots of waterfalls.



Cascade Canyon





Because the hike ended in the early afternoon, we decided to start driving north to make a little progress to cut down on drive time the following day up to Glacier National Park at the very northern edge of Montana. The drive through Yellowstone was beautiful - Yellowstone Lake and lush river valleys bathed in early evening light. The only drawback to this place is the stupidity of people creating many safety hazards. I was following a motorcycle with two riders down a winding road when we came around a bend to find cars stopped all over both lanes of the road. We weren't going fast, but the abruptness of it made it hard for the motorcycle to come to a full stop in time. Thankfully, as the heavy motorcycle fell over, both riders jumped out in time to avoid being seriously injured. I never did see what the fuss was all about - maybe a squirrel, or deer. Later on, I did see an elk with a humongous rack - it was probably six or seven feet across with six points on each antler. It was walking right along the road. Then there was a black bear eating grass about fifty feet from the road - awesome!

GLACIER
Not a single spot was available in Yellowstone's campgrounds, so we continued up north into Montana and it wasn't until 9pm and close to Livingston that we set up in a near empty FS campground for a night's rest. The following day's drive brought us to St. Mary, the eastern entrance to Glacier National Park. The first place to stop was the visitor's center to get a backcountry permit for backpacking. The park leaves half of all backcountry campground sites open to walk-ins, whereas the other half could be reserved up to six months in advance for a $30 processing fee. Anyway, it took two hours to get that permit, and I was not entralled with St. Mary by the end of that ordeal (one person working and she was on break when we went in). After this, we were lucky enough to get a spot at Many Glacier campground, which at 20/night is highway robbery as far as campgrounds go, but nicely situated. The Many Glacier area is truly spectacular - arguably the most concentrated stark beauty in the Park. The zenith of this is the Grinnell Glacier valley. The trail up to Grinnell Glacier was simply amazing. Wildflowers were blooming in profusion along the trail, the lakes were glacier-silt blue, there were waterfalls, glacier-carved peaks...and on and on. Everywhere I looked it was spectacular. The trail was closed and actually roped off about a mile before the glacier due to snow. There were several snow bridges to cross before the glacier, so we didn't risk it - it would be a loooong slide down if one slipped.

Lake Josephine
Angel Wing, Grinnell Lake, remnants of Grinnell Glacier in the upper right - it has been receding very rapidly.


The backpack into the Belly River region of Glacier, which is right next to the Canadian border, was spectacular. Huge meadows of wildflowers, dramatic scenery, rivers, lakes, waterfalls...

Camp was at Glenns Lake. The edge of the lake was shallow and the afternoon sun warmed the water up quite nicely, so I washed up for the first time in days. Then it was supper at the communal food prep area, required because of bear concerns. We met a nice couple from Seattle, and she was celebrating her birthday that night with a tiramisu from Backpackers Pantry! They seemed very happy. Later on, a couple of guys showed up who were backpacking all over the park. They drove 36 hrs straight through from Ohio! They came from the Two Medicine area and confirmed what we had heard from the rangers, which was that much of that higher country was snow covered and winter conditions prevailed even though it was the beginning of July. I'm glad we stayed away from that - I wanted summer.

Belly River
Nick on a foot bridge over Belly River.
Cosley Lake
Hanging up food so bears can't get to it.

Going to the Sun Road

At the suggestion of friends, I dedicated my time at Glacier to the East side of the park, and I'm glad I did. I much prefer its stark beauty to the forested west side. Before leaving the east side, we found the pie shop I'd heard about and I had an amazing strawberry rhubard pie with ice cream and a bison burger. It was the perfect way to wrap up the Glacier trip. I highly recommend it - the cafe's called Park Place, I think. Here Nick and I parted, with him going east to Fargo, ND, and me west. It was great to have had his company.

I headed off to my night's home in Missoula by traversing the Going to the Sun Road, an impressive engineering feat, to the west. Road construction just beyond Logan Pass required a fifteen minute stop. That turned out great because I was able to get out of the car for a top of the world view. Spectacular!