Where We’ve Been the Past Month

July 16, 2024

Post #3 July 16, 2024

Our apologies that we have not been posting. We’ve been traveling in Juneau, Gustavus (Glacier Bay) and Haines, Alaska. Two of our sons and son-in-law Adrian joined us for part of the trip in Juneau and Gustavus. Both places were highlights, but before we got to those places we stopped for an overnight at Kathleen Lake in Kluane National Park & Preserve in the Yukon Territories. We return to Kluane tomorrow for a week of hiking and biking.

In Juneau we spent the week at a campground situated at the foot of Mendenhall Glacier. The glacier dominates the view from town. It’s not every day that you pull into your local Safeway and see a towering glacier that looks like it’s going to plow through the parking lot. To celebrate our middle son’s 30th birthday we helicoptered to the Herbert Glacier (a birthday present from his bros and us). Yeah glaciers are all over the place in this part of southeast Alaska and southwest Canada. We learned that the ice fields that feed all these glaciers are part of the world’s largest terrestrial World Heritage Site.

In Gustavus we boat-toured Glacier Bay National Park, which is a must see if you visit southeast Alaska, The amount of marine and land wildlife is tremendous. You can’t come to Glacier Bay and not leave feeling like you’ve been on a North American safari. In Gustavus we also attended their 4th of July small town festival which included an egg-toss and human ‘whale-breaching’ contest, which means standing in the local estuary and throwing your friend as high into the air as possible! Two days later we were also fortunate to attend the 2nd annual Burning Pines festival in a forest clearing near Gustavus. Bands present included the Bards of Mendenhell, who raged on until the wee hours. Of course we got the t-shirt!

We are now in Haines where we took a two day side trip to Skagway. Haines is a fishing port that looks and feels like a very genuine Alaskan town where real Alaskans live and raise families (eg we’re finishing our blog at the Haines Library.) Skagway with towering cruise ships in their small harbor is very much the tourist town, but nonetheless interesting for its history as the gateway to the Klondike gold rush. It’s nuts what people did when gold fever set in. They traveled 1000s of miles to Skagway by ship to just access the Klondike gold fields 600 miles inland in Dawson, Canada. They each had to pack 1 ton of supplies up the Chilkoot Pass to the Canadian border before they were allowed into Canada to start their 600 mile journey to the east. Of the estimated 100,000 “stampeders” that arrived in Skagway only about 100 became wealthy in the Klondike.

We are off tomorrow to Kluane for a week of hiking and biking. Internet service is really sparse there so the next time we post will be from Valdez around Aug 1st.