Dan and Vicki Coyote Travels: Passing to the Inside

Inside Passage

Days 44 & 45 – July 9 - 10, 2015

Now driving for 43 days does provide surprises around every corner and vistas never before seen as well as the opportunity to stop on a whim and a chance. However, for a change of pace we decided to take our Coyote on the Alaskan Marine Highway. Leaving Haines on the ferry we traveled to Juneau (to which there are no car roads at all) and stayed there for four days.

Besides being the state capital of Alaska, Juneau is a popular visit for the monster cruise ships. So the port of Juneau can see up to eight cruise ships that are immense, enormous, colossal (ok, you get it … it makes our ferry look like a tugboat) that disgorge thousands of tourists every day into the city. The population is doubled and the residents are preoccupied with entertaining those tourists and visualize Honolulu or a small version of Vegas. So … we left the downtown to its business and ventured to other more verdant vistas and entertainment by the local fauna.

The flowers in the picture are found in Glacier Gardens … a neat place created by a local gardener who capitalized on 400+ acres destroyed by an avalanche and rendered commercially useless. He rearranged the hillside with detention ponds and drainage and roads all intended to deter future avalanches and then planted daisies and begonias and thousands of other floral wonders. Including upside down dead trees planted with flowers … flower towers! A tour through these gardens is incredible. Our tour guide is a microbiology student from Nevada.

Ice Everywhere

Beyond Juneau in the mountains are thousands of acres of glaciers a icefield. The Juneau Icefield is an ice field located just north of Juneau, Alaska and continues north through the border with British Columbia and is the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere, extending through an area of 1,500 sq mi. in the Coast Range ranging 87 mi north to south and 47 mi east to west. The icefield is the source of many glaciers including the Mendenhall Glacier and the Taku Glacier. The ice field is home to over 40 large valley glaciers and 100 smaller ones.

They pour out into the channels and inlets. OK … ‘pour’ may be a poor choice of words … they are receding which means they are melting and calving and filling the lakes and channels and rivers below them that eventually run into the ocean. A ranger says that by 2050 these glaciers will no longer be visible as they are now.

These first two pictures are of glaciers taken from the ferry before we docked. The first picture is Taku Glacier; the second is Mendenhall Glacier.

The third picture is the Mendenhall Glacier up close. There is a visitor center there with all kinds of ranger talks and fascinating information. Trails lead out for closer looks of the glacier
and to an adjacent water fall.

Camping

The best sites to overnight or stay a few days we have found are the state, federal (Forest Service, Nat’l Parks and campgrounds) or provincial parks. Inexpensive (1/2 price if you have a USA senior pass). They are cheap, safe and large. Some of them have sites so large you can’t see the next camper in any direction. For example, In Juneau at the Mendenhall Forest Service campground, we bet the sites were a minimum of ½ acre each or more, and were only $21 a night with full hookups. In Haines, the state campground, Chilkoot Lake, was at the end of a beautiful river road and the sites were on or near the lake… boondocking for $15.