Juneau - Whale Watching and the Mendenhall Glacier

After enjoying the Tracy Arm Fjord, we felt like we had already enjoyed a full day of seeing Alaska, but we went to Juneau instead of being done with the day.  It was raining in Juneau, by the way.  And I have to give Jeff credit one more time, because he had booked a whale watching trip for us in advance, and also independent of the cruise line.  This saved us money and gave us an experience much more suited to our personalities than the cruise line excursion would have given to us.  We met up with the little bus that would take us to our little boat, and there were 14 people on board.  Had we gone with the cruise line, we would have ridden a gigantic tour bus to our boat with something like 120 passengers.  We enjoyed chatting with the captain and assistant/naturalist on our boat, and we also enjoyed being on the lookout for whales so that our captain could take us all to go look at them

We didn't see any whales breeching, but we did see lots of them spouting, and we saw lots of tails.  The rain mostly stopped, and we were able to go outside the boat to get a better look.  I wondered if I would get seasick, but I didn't.  Being outside on the boat and feeling the breeze on my face was exhilarating.  Here's just one of our whale friends making his presence known.

I thought this was a good picture of Jeff.  I had the little camera with me on the boat, so he was taking far-away shots, and I was taking close-ups.

One whale's dorsal fin and another whale's tail.  There were a bunch of whale-watching boats out there…probably too many…but the law prohibits any of them from approaching a whale and getting too close to it.  (I forget how close - 100 feet, maybe.)

We were told that each tail's markings are like a fingerprint - completely unique - and that most of the whales in the area had been catalogued by their tail markings.  There was a binder full of pictures of tails on the boat.  If we got any photos that were good enough to see the tail markings, we could look up the whale and its name, habits, etc., in the binder.  We didn't get any, but it was still interesting.

The sea lions were fun to watch, too.  I learned the difference between seals and sea lions on this trip.  I'll spare you the details except to say that sea lions can be aggressive and you want to stay away from them.  They are the ones on the California coast.  They have been known to kill small children that they thought were threatening their breeding grounds.  Don't mess with them.

I mentioned the boat was small, right?  Here we are on the back of it.

I thought this was an even better picture of Jeff!

 

After our whale watching trip, which was over all too soon, we took a short bus ride to the visitor center at the Mendenhall glacier.  I don't even know what to say about it.  It wasn't my first glacier of the day, but it was still awe-inspiring.

You can see in this picture how big the waterfall is compared to the people who are going to see it, and then in the next picture, 

you can see how tiny the waterfall is compared to the glacier.  Even with this picture, it's hard to comprehend how huge the glacier is.

Our little bus brought us back to the bus stop, and then we had a nice walk back to our ship, which you can see here in the foreground with the sunset in the background.  The ship was huge.  It had room for 3500 passengers.

I liked this flower, so I had to take a picture of it.  Maybe because where we live, there's not enough water around for green things of any kind to grow next to the road, let alone wildflowers.  We couldn't get over how moist and beautiful Alaska was, even in the ordinary places.

Sunset in Juneau, with the mountains and our ship.  What a full and amazing day!!!