Susie-2011: July 2011

To date we have seen 4 moose.

OK, Sarah has some strange neighbors. They might be subletting a tent in their backyard. Lucas has seen people sleeping out there.

Another neighbor is smoking salmon in their back yard. You can barely see the salmon, but I can assure you it is there.

The first full day Meme and Byrom were here, we went to Humpy's for lunch. We had calamari and halibut. It was wonderful.

After lunch we went to the

There are beautiful flowers at the park. When I was here in January, there were artist carving ice sculptures.

On Thursday, we got up VERY early to make our way to Seward, Alaska. The 5th largest port in the United States. The drive was amazing. It took about 2 hours.

We passed Potter's Marsh, Beluga Point and other beautiful places along the way. We also saw big horn sheep on the cliffs.

Just passed this point is Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. We got tickets to go to the conservation center with the tour tickets, but Lucas says it is like a Crystal City Zoo. Doesn't sound impressive.

We arrived in Seward to see clouds along the mountains.

The company that we booked our glacier tour on. A fjord is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created in a valley carved by glacial activity.

Sailboats in the harbor. Lucas comes here to inspect boats when working for the Coast Guard.

Our boat, the Tanaina. Our ships captain was Chris. The boat would travel around 27 mph and travel water from 1400' to 20' deep.

The map of our tours is below. Our tour was 8 hours. Our tour was the gold arrow tour, the National Park tour. We started around 10:00 a.m. We had lunch on the boat. We arrived at Fox Island for a Park Ranger presentation and dinner at 4:30. We got back to the harbor at 6:30.

Sarah doing some camera maintenance so that she can go back on deck to take more pictures. She took almost 1000 pictures in the last 2 days.

3 windows

This might be Byrom looking at Bald Eagles. The Bald Eagles flew right over the bow of the ship. We saw a Sea Otter, Harbor Seals, Cormorant bird (no big deal), Common Murre (looks like a penguin), Horned Puffin, Tufted Puffin, Humpback Whale (barely) and Dall's Porpoise (looks like killer whale). The whale was 30' to 50' and weighed between 50,000 and 60,000 lbs.

Aialik Glacier. It is HUGE. The captain stopped the boat for 20 minutes or so so that we could hear the "voice" of the glacier. It crackled and broke off into the water in pieces every few minutes. It was amazing. The water in the area of the glacier is grey. It has the debris of the mountain in it. There are 4 types of glaciers; hanging, alpine, tide water and peadmont/valley. The Aialik Glacier is a peadmont/valley glacier. Glaciers extended all the way to Chicago at one point.

This is a chunk of the glacier in the water by our boat.

Not sure how this happened, but Sarah got gum all over all three of her bracelets. Mom worked and worked until she got them almost clean.

View outside of our hotel room. In Seward we went to Sarah's favorite candy shop and got got candy and gelato, yummy!

The guys loading truck and mom supervising.

Alaskan Sealife Center

Lucas showing me where he is going in a month or so. It is the second farthest island in the Aleutian Island chain.

Rock fish, so ugly!

Resurrection Bay

Across the bay is a maximum security prison. They are locked up for 23 hours a day.

In Seward, Lowell Creek ran through town. At some point they drilled a hole in mountain and diverted the creek through the mountain and into Resurrection Bay.