Juneau - Day 1

After 12 glorious hours of sleep, we are both feeling wonderful and rearing to go. The mosquitoes here at the campsite are ferocious and the size of moose. We dodge them in the morning while fixing breakfast and again when we get back at night to fix supper. Since it is not raining, the first thing on the agenda this morning is a hike at the Mendenhall Glacier.

The glacier is about a half mile wide at the base and 12 miles long and it is very impressive to look at. Huge chunks of blue glacial ice lie in the lake in front of the glacier. Glacial ice takes a long time to melt because it is so compacted and all the air has been pressed out of it. Hiking up the East Glacier Trail, it started to rain, and worse than that, we found out after 2 hours that this trail did not lead to a scenic overlook of the Nugget Creek Falls as we had hoped.

After the hike, we ate lunch at Heritage Coffee Glacier Café on the Mall Road. We had great Glacier Salads with more “stuff” in it than it had lettuce. We then drove to “The End of the Road.” This 40 mile long road starts downtown and heads north along the water. We started at Auke Bay today and are headed north. Tomorrow we will take it south when we tour downtown Juneau.

Driving north through Auke Village, Lena Cove and Tee Harbor was quite interesting, but when we got to the Shrine of St. Theresa, things really got interesting. There were 2 police cars there and then another 2 arrived within a few minutes. Five officers were on the beach with a woman who they ended up taking into custody for reasons unknown to us. It appeared as if she was having some kind of a life crisis.

We drove past Eagle Beach, down to Amalga Harbor, stopped at several amazing scenic overlooks and turned around at Echo Cove which is the end of the road. The sun had come out most of the day, after the brief rain we had in the morning, but now we had spritzes on and off. On the drive back, we saw several eagles and 2 whales as they dove under the water. At one turnout that we stopped at, someone had intentionally thrown hundreds of nails in the parking spot. They were old and rusted, but still probably producing many flat tires for unsuspecting motorist. Dave thinks it’s a tire guy, looking for business.

After our drive, we went back to the Mendenhall Glacier and hiked to the Nugget Creek Falls on the beach this time. The hike included climbing over a rock slide, which our children can relate to, it was like “Jetty Jogging”. We got up close and personal with the falls and super close to the glacier. The sun was out and we had another great day here in Alaska.

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