Alaska Vacation

Alaska Vacation

Last week we went on vacation with my family on an Alaska cruise!! I’ve always wanted to go to Alaska, and my dad’s been talking about this trip for 8 years. It was AMAZING to finally get to do it!!! Just about everything I looked at took my breath away, and it was so special to do it all with my whole family. Only seeing them (all together) twice a year is hard, but it makes our time together all the sweeter. We departed from Seattle, and we arrived a full day before our cruise left, so we got to see a little bit of the city. I’ve been to California before, but never Washington, and Stephen hadn’t been west of the Rockies before. We had to get up at 4:30 to make our flight, so we didn’t have a ton of energy to do things in Seattle, but we got to walk around the city and the market a little bit. It was beautiful!!

We were on the ship for 7 days, and we stopped at 4 ports. We spent Monday in Juneau, Tuesday in Skagway, Wednesday cruising through Glacier Bay National Park, Thursday in Ketchikan, and Friday in Victoria, British Columbia. While we were on the ship we spent a lot of time playing cards (Eukre and Spades mostly) and one of our favorite board games, 7 Wonders. Yes, we brought a board game on our cruise, and I am so glad we did!

You’ll notice there are more pictures of me in there than usual….I’m trying to be better about asking people to take MY picture! I love landscape photography, which means on trips like this I can sometimes forget to document the people who are there. I think I did a pretty good job at it this time! Keep scrolling and you’ll see pictures from each port and a little description of what we did there.

Seattle

Juneau

In Juneau we went on a whale watching tour and a nature walk around Mendenhall Glacier. Juneau actually gets almost twice the amount of rain that Seattle does, so a sunny and 85 degree day was a huge blessing!! We spent a couple hours on the boat sailing around the islands near Juneau, and it was incredible. We saw a couple humpback whales hanging out separately, but then we found a whole group of 8 or 10 feeding together. It’s called Bubble Net Feeding, and it only happens for a week or two of the year. The whales all dive together, find a school of fish, and surround it. They push the fish together in a tight group and blow bubbles underneath them to force them to the surface. When they get to the surface, the whales all come out of the water at once with their mouths wide open trying to get as many fish as they can. When you look at the picture, you can see a bunch of white stripes…that’s the inside of the roof of their mouths! Our captain put a microphone in the water and we could hear the whales calling to each other right before they began to surface. How cool is that???

The photo on the left is a picture of an informational sign near Mendenhall Glacier. It’s a picture of what the glacier looked like from that spot in 1938. The glacier has receded more than 2.5 miles since 1500, and there were markers along the trail that showed the ice limit in different years. The wooden structure in the picture was built by the Civilian Conservation Core in the 30s. You can see the same wooden structure in the picture on the right that I took. The view is very different! It took us several more minutes to walk to a location where we could even see the glacier (from across a lake).

Skagway

Skagway is an old gold rush town. Thousands of people came through this city in 1898 on their way to the Klondike region of the Yukon in Canada. We took a bus ride up to Fraser, British Columbia along the same path the miners hiked, and then we took a train back down to Skagway. The views were incredible! When we got back to Skagway we went to a recreation of an old tent mining town for a salmon back and gold panning. Stephen took all the pictures of us panning for gold…he might be a photographer yet!

This is quite possibly my favorite photo of my parents ever. They’re so cute.

The purple plant in the photo below is called fireweed, and I am so happy it was in bloom while we were in Alaska. They added color and depth to my landscape shots that I couldn’t have gotten any other way.

Glacier Bay

Ketchikan

Ketchikan is on a large island in the Southeastern-most part of Alaska. If you thought Seattle and Juneau get a lot of rain, think again! Seattle gets about 38 inches of rain per year, Juneau 62, but Ketchikan gets almost 155 inches of rain every year!! Our guides told us that if it goes more than a couple days without raining it’s officially a drought. Crazy! You can see the clouds and mist in a lot of my pictures from Ketchikan, which is obviously not unusual. The water droplets on the fireweed was amazing!! We took a back-country off-road jeep drive up to an overlook and then down to a lake where we went canoeing. Stephen got to drive which he was really excited about.

Victoria

Victoria was possibly the most beautiful city I’ve ever been to. We didn’t have a scheduled excursion planned there, so Stephen and my siblings and I just walked around the city for a few hours. The waterfront was amazing, the gardens were immaculate (I mean, they had peacocks!), and the harbor and surrounding buildings were break-taking at night. They even have a castle! It was a great way to end our trip.