Dateline May 30, 2011, Juneau to Sitka to Skagway
Juneau gave us plenty of side adventures. We started with the Glacier Gardens tour, which took us up through the trees to nearly six hundred feet, where we learned how the glacier forest comes back after a landslide. Trees coming down create the ecosystem that lets other trees and plants thrive in their place. There is a quiet logic to it that is hard to grasp until you see the layers in front of you.
Of course we drove up to Mendenhall Glacier too. Seeing any glacier up close is a "wow" moment, and at Mendenhall we could walk right up and put a hand on the ice. It is not a thing you forget.
The Mendenhall stayed in view as we headed back to the port and onto the ferry. The views from the deck as we pulled away were spectacular.
The Alaska Marine Highway runs both fast ferries and slower ones, and we ended up on both. The fast ferry we boarded was named the Fairweather, which happens to be John's mother's family name. We took it as a small wave from somewhere.
Along the way we saw whales, blacks, humpbacks, and orcas, sometimes all on the same crossing.
In Sitka we stayed at the town harbor RV parking area and spent a day driving around.
Sitka is an interesting town. Russian history still shows on the buildings and in the names, but the cruise ship traffic has brought in the now-familiar wave of typical tourist storefronts. We went to the Sitka National Historical Park, which is built around totem poles, and learned more there than we expected. The very tall poles, the ones most people picture, are no more than one hundred seventy-five to two hundred years old. Before that the poles were much shorter, but they carried the same symbols of family and clan.
In the morning we boarded the ferry north toward Skagway, with one overnight in Juneau on the way. It was another beautiful day and a great trip.
We arrived in Skagway late the next evening and stayed at the local park by the ferry port. Skagway is a very small town with many cruise ships rolling in daily, which means many jewelry stores. "St. Thomas, Alaska," is what came to mind.
The big event of our Skagway stay was the drive up to Carcross and back, which we had been told was one of the great drives of the area. It did not disappoint. The road climbs the route that the Klondike gold rush hikers walked in 1898, up over White Pass.
It is impossible to look at that landscape and understand how anyone got over it on foot, with the gear they had, in the weather they had. At the top of the pass sits a string of lakes, and the story goes that the prospectors, having made it over, cut every large tree in sight to build the boats they needed to float down to the goldfields. There is a five-mile radius around those lakes where the big trees never came back. The current road over the pass was completed in the late 1970s, only the third route across after foot and railroad.
And then we saw bears. Three of them, and they turned out to be grizzlies. The biggest was a full-grown adult, and there was a year-old male too, who looked cute and fuzzy from a safe distance. They were closer than we expected, and we kept the windows up.
Back in Skagway we rested at the park and turned in early. The morning ferry would take us to Haines to meet up with some of our Roadtrek group. We could not wait to see them.
