Day 2 - Juneau

Everyone who really knows me, know that my favorite color is blue.  I like everything in blue; blue clothes, blue paint, blue furniture, blue flowers and blue M & M’s.  Everything is better in blue!  I also love to take pictures and the thing I always look for is blue skies for photos.  Many times, I will insist that Tony and I go back to a certain photographic location because the sky wasn’t blue at the time.  Glacial lakes, mountains, animals, flowers, everything looks better with a beautiful blue sky and sun.  For as much as a sunny blue sky with puffy white clouds will enhance your photos, a grey sky will do just the opposite.  Spectacular scenery is mundane, flat and lifeless.  I live for blue skies on vacation, so I was starting to get a little depressed when I awoke AGAIN to 50 shades of grey and a low foggy ceiling.  I am normally a happy person that doesn’t get grumpy about much.  However, the caveat to that is going on a trip of a lifetime and having grey skies at every port!  I was not happy; poor Tony! 

 

We had lots of plans for Juneau.  It started off great, first thing we see as we get off the ship is a Bald Eagle posing for me!  I quickly changed lenses and was able to get a nice close-up of a dry eagle this time.  In addition, there is a tram that takes you to the top of Mt. Robertson starts in the area where the ships dock.  Lots of activity in that small area as you get off the ships. 

We had 13 hours in port and our main stop would be the Mendenhall Glacier, a NPS National Park which is located a short distance from downtown Juneau in the Tongass National Forest.  The glacier is twelve miles long from its origin on the Juneau Icefield to its terminus at Mendenhall Lake.  Tony and I have come to love glaciers over the years after visiting the Canadian Rockies in Alberta Canada and visiting the Athabasca Glacier in 1996.  Last year we visited Glacier National Park and took hikes to several glaciers and those incredible sights had us hungry for more.  The two highlights of our trip would be the Mendenhall Glacier and the Margarie Glacier in Glacier Bay.  If I could only have limited access to sun, please let it be in those two places because of course, glaciers show up better with blue skies behind them.  Maybe the weather would clear...   Not!

Unless there is no other way to get there, we tend not to take tours.  We like to hike, explore and take our time.  I like to take a million pictures and putting us on a timed tour just is too stressful.  I have wanted to go the Mendenhall Glacier for many years, so we were excited to take our own tour to the glacier on the $8 Glacier Shuttle to the glacier, a 30 minute trip from downtown Juneau. 

Mendenhall was located in bear country.  No food or flavored drinks were allowed on the trails.  Too bad we didn’t know that before came; we had packed sandwiches.  At least Tony was carrying the food; I could take pictures if the bears tried to get his pack!  Had the salmon been running, we almost would have been assured of seeing a bear, four bears had been in the area the day before, but luckily we didn’t run into any on the trail.  The Mendenhall Glacier is visible from almost any location in the park.  It is an immense, impressive presence.  One of the hikes took you through rain forest areas with heavy moss growth on the ground and trees, much like those in Olympic National Park and Capilano in Vancouver.  The wild flowers were just starting to bloom; lupines and fireweed.  There also were some interesting mushrooms and cone flower plants too just steps away from the lake.  The runoff from the glacier forms the Mendenhall Lake.  From time to time, chunks of the glacier will break off and fall into the lake, a process called calving.  The hike went along the banks of the lake directly opposite the glacier.  It was exciting to see that there were a number of icebergs floating in the lake and we found a small one that had washed ashore and it was perfect for a photo prop. 

The Mendenhall Glacier is one of the top attractions in Juneau and lots of people from the cruise ships make the trek to visit there.  In addition to the glacier and the glacial lake there is a huge waterfall of melting snow from the mountains.  From across the lake, we could see people standing

at the base of the waterfall.  It is only when seeing people the size of ants does it give perspective to the sheer magnitude of both the waterfall and the glacier.  When you go into the visitor center, there were many displays of the regression of the glacier.  Since 1958 the Mendenhall Glacier has receded 1.75 miles.  Glaciers all over Alaska and the world are receding.  Wikipedia explains the reasons the best “The Little Ice Age was a period from about 1550 to 1850 when the world experienced relatively cooler 

Blue ice of the glacier under cloudy skies!

temperatures compared to the present. Subsequently, until about 1940, glaciers around the world retreated as the climate warmed substantially. Glacial retreat slowed and even reversed temporarily, in many cases, between 1950 and 1980 as a slight global cooling occurred. Since 1980, a significant global warming has led to glacier retreat becoming increasingly rapid and ubiquitous, so much so that some glaciers have disappeared altogether, and the existence of a great number of the remaining glaciers of the world is threatened.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850 . 

My hopes for sun were dashed as showers moved into the area in the afternoon.  We were through exploring the park and decided to move onto the next adventure, a salmon hatchery.  After Ian had told us about the hatchery in Capilano, I was anxious to see one in action; with lots of fish.  Turns out we could take a public bus to the Macaulay Salmon Fish Hatchery just outside of downtown Juneau.  The hatchery is a non-profit organization that generates 
over 150 million salmon fry a year.  The process is amazing and quite a production.  Luckily the Coho Salmon were just starting to run and we were able to watch the salmon ladder in action.  A salmon ladder is a man-made structure that simulates the process of the salmon migrating  upstream, fighting the currents to the calm waters where they spawn.  There were lots of salmon using the ladder.  Those fish were huge, at least 30-36” and nasty looking.  I didn’t know they had such wicked teeth! 

In the wild, salmon migrate from far reaches of the ocean to the

same fresh water river where they were born.  There they lay their eggs far up river in fresh water in the summer.  The eggs will normally fall down into the rocks at the bottom of the streams; incubate for several months and the hatched fish fry, live off the yolk sacks until they are old enough to migrate down the river to the sea sometime from March to May of the following season.  So they are born in fresh water, live their adult life in salt water and come back to fresh water to spawn.  A fish that does that is Anadromous and besides salmon include smelt, shad, striped bass, and sturgeon.  Most fish cannot tolerate going between the two types of water, so it is quite remarkable that nature has adapted them so that the small fish have a greater chance of survival before they enter the ocean.

In a fish hatchery, salmon have their eggs harvested.  After the fish navigate the ladder they are sorted by sex, the captured salmon are shocked unconscious, the eggs are removed and artificially fertilized in a bucket and the contents is poured into huge trays filled with water and stored in a dark warehouse for several months until they hatch.  When they have exhausted their egg sacks they are then put into huge tanks and fed a specially concocted fish food until they are large enough to release to swim back into the ocean.  To make sure that they return to the same location to spawn, the small fish have the fresh waters of the nearby river infused into the tanks.  This is called imprinting-it stimulates the salmons senses to recognize the smell and location of the river and it will only return to that location to spawn 3-7 years later, depending on the variety.  Before the salmon fry are released, approximately 15% have a top vestigial fin on top clipped and a small wire inserted into their nose that identifies which hatchery it came from.  If the salmon are caught, the fishermen return the wire to the hatchery with information that helps them track the location of the salmon that were released.

The Coho Salmon in the fish ladder had been raised in captivity but come back to spawn at the exact location where they were released, it is totally amazing how strong the homing instinct of the salmon is.  As salmon on breed once and then die, the adult salmon at the hatchery are sent to processing plants for pet food once the eggs have been harvested.  In the wild they are eaten by bears, eagles and many other animals and is one of the major food sources for those animals.  The circle of life-oops, wrong park!

Juneau is a cute little town and before boarding the ship we stopped at the Red Dog Saloon and had an Alaskan Amber beer.  I even liked it!.  We met this couple Kevin and Margaret from Australia and had a nice afternoon talking to them.  Once again the weather cleared that evening as we set sail for our next destination, Skagway.  However shortly before midnight ominous clouds filled the sky.