Gallivanting Grandma

Saturday August 24, 2019

It was a chilly, windy, and rainy morning on the Millennium. We were 200 miles northwest of Juneau on our way to see Hubbard Glacier.

The shipboard naturalists gave running commentary as we approached the very impressive river of ice off the coast of Yakutat, Alaska.

We began to see small icebergs floating in the blue-green glacial water. A large steel excursion boat came alongside the ship and took on 50 hearty people who wanted to get closer to the glacier.

Because of the weather, the original plan was to spend a short time at the glacier.  However as we got closer, the rain stopped and the sky cleared.

Hubbard Glacier is gigantic and very impressive. The face – where the ice meets the water – is more than six miles across and 400 feet tall. It takes 400 years for ice to travel the length of the glacier, so the ice we were looking at is 400 years old.

The Millennium made many 360 degree turns and we stayed watching the glacier for several hours. I took a gazillion photos!

The excursion boat gives an idea of the relative height of the ice. There’s supposed to be more ice under the water than above it.

Every few minutes we heard ice break off and fall into the bay. The glacier frequently “calves” off icebergs which can be the size of ten-story buildings. First we heard a loud sound, like thunder. Then we looked where we thought the sound was coming from. If we were lucky, we saw the ice fall in a cascade and splash into the water.

After many hours, the ship turned and cruised out to sea and away from the very impressive Hubbard Glacier. What an experience!!

Friday August 23, 2019

I had a good nights sleep at the hotel in Seward.  When we looked out of the window from the lobby, we saw the Celebrity Millennium docked across the harbor. It was a hazy chilly morning.

The breakfast room was crowded so we happily shared a table with a middle-aged couple. The man worked in Alaskan state government and they were on their way to Juneau (the capital of Alaska) for the opening of the new legislative assembly. We had a lively conversation but largely avoided hot political topics.

We were so close to the cruise terminal, we decided to walk to the ship. It was the quickest boarding process ever and we spent the rest of the day exploring the ship and relaxing. Here are a few photos I took of the interior of the Celebrity Millennium before the crowds arrived:

It was foggy and overcast as the ship left the dock about six o’clock and headed south out of Resurrection Bay and into the Gulf of Alaska.

Thursday – August 22, 2019

I had trouble sleeping last night in anticipation of our 4:50am alarm. We had made reservations from home to take the early morning train from Anchorage to Seward. We checked out of the Embassy Suites at 5:45 – an excellent place to stay in Anchorage! – and took a taxi to the lovely Art Deco train station.

The sun was rising as we boarded and the station was crowded with foreign and American tourists.  We had good seats with easy access to the Dome Car. The train is clean and comfortable with onboard commentary given by naturalists who pointed out wildlife as we zipped along.

This is a popular route and the train takes about 4.5 hours to travel 114 miles to Seward. The scenery along the way is magnificent and several glaciers are clearly visible depending on the weather. Unfortunately, forest fires southeast of Anchorage cast a smoky haze on most of our route today.

About half an hour outside Seward, in a place called Moose Pass, all the passengers had to get off the train and take buses into Seward. We were told there was flooding on the tracks. The bus left us at the train station and we had an easy walk to our hotel. We had decided to arrive one day early to explore Seward before boarding the cruise ship tomorrow.

Seward, Alaska is a lucrative commercial fishing port and terminus for the Alaskan railroad. The port is a mix of commercial vessels (some of which take tourists out on fishing expeditions), pleasure boats, and cruise ships. There were several seafood processing plants in the harbor.

In the afternoon, we took a free shuttle bus to the “Historic District” of Seward. The older woman who drove the shuttle gave local information and descriptions at every stop. She said the district was only a block and a half long and we could tell we were in it by the fancy lamp poles.

We browsed slowly along the main street to the end of town, which literally comes to a point at the edge of the bay. There are less than 3,000 permanent residents in Seward. With an average annual temperature of 40 degrees and 74 inches of rain per year, living there wouldn’t appeal to me.

We took the shuttle back to the hotel just in time to see the ‘catch of the day’ for one of the tourist fishing boats. We watched them weigh and clean the fish.  Of course, we had to have king crab legs and fish for dinner!

Wednesday August 21, 2019

It was a cool 53 degrees this morning and the air was much clearer than the last couple of days. We heard reports that the forest fires were diminishing. We drove to the Alaska Native Heritage Center located just outside Anchorage. The educational and cultural center’s goal is to educate visitors and share the heritage of Alaska’s 11 major indigenous groups.

We arrived in “The Gathering Place” of the main building to hear a young man talk about his life growing up with his grandparents in northern St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Afterwards, there was a musical performance of singing and dancing.

The Heritage Center is located in a beautiful setting on Lake Tiulana. Five distinct houses were constructed around the lake to replicate Alaskan villages. They demonstrate how different indigenous groups of people lived and survived in the harsh northern climate.

In the southeastern part of Alaska, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and Eyak people lived in wooden houses built out of local spruce and pine trees:

The Unangax and Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) people of the Aleutian peninsula and islands built their homes largely underground or covered with earth:

The northern Inupiaq and St Lawrence Island Yupik groups also built their houses under earth and had small entrances to keep out bears and cold weather:

The Athabaskan people of the interior of Alaska built log houses out of available trees:

There were interpreters inside each house who explained how residents lived and used their hand-made tools. It was an incredible experience to hear about the peoples’ resourcefulness and survival skills. The people survived in extreme northern conditions for thousands of years.

Later, we had tea outdoors with a view of the lake. There were signs everywhere warning us about bears. When I asked the man at the cafe about the signs, he showed me his “bear spray’ which he kept close at hand, right under the counter. We didn’t see any bears….

It was still early when we left the Heritage Center, so we drove to the Anchorage Museum located downtown in the center of the city.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the ultra-modern exterior of the museum, but it was another excellent place to visit to learn about the land, peoples, art, and history of Alaska.

There was an exhibition of Salmon: catching, breeding, fishing, cooking, and eating. Also included was an explanation of the different kinds of salmon and ‘when and where’ to catch them.

Also contemporary Alaskan art:

Both the Alaska Native Heritage Center and the Anchorage Museum had excellent exhibits and were great introductions to Alaska for us first time visitors!  In the evening, we had dinner at the Moose Tooth Pub & Pizzeria. I had Margarita pizza with reindeer sausage – not bad. Later, back at the hotel we turned on Alaskan television. The most exciting program was a nature show on PBS: The Squirrel’s Guide to Success.  I’m not making this up! We didn’t watch much of it. We’ll catch it when it comes to New York!! :-)

Tuesday August 20, 2019

The odor of pungent wood-smoke hung in the air. Thousands of acres of forest were burning north of Anchorage near the town of Talkeetna which had closed the road to Denali National Park and stranded hundreds of tourists in the park. It was a chilly 41 degrees this morning and it would have been a sunny day except for the thick smoky haze.

We rented a car for our few days in Anchorage so we drove out to the town of Wasilla to visit the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters. It’s a charming place of several log cabins where we met Raymie Reddington, the son of one of the founders of the Iditarod Race. He had a team of dogs tied to a cart on wheels which he used to train the dogs during the summer.

When I was teaching, I taught a unit about the Iditarod Race. My classes and I followed the teams on the Internet as they raced approximately 1000 miles from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. The Iditarod always starts during the first weekend in March and runs about eight to 15 days. The children learned about the mushers and their dogs. They studied the history of the race in the context of learning about our 50th state and people’s early dependence on their hearty Alaskan dogs. The Iditarod unit was exciting and a lot of fun for everyone!!

The museum in the headquarter’s building displayed many photographs and had memorabilia collected from past races. We saw an excellent video and heard an excellent first-hand account of background information. Here’s a picture of me and Raymie Reddington with his dogs resting in the background:

Jeff and I were able to pet two and a half week-old sled dog puppies, Mr. Bean and Lima Bean.  They were soooo sweet:

Later, we left Wasilla and drove east on the Glenn Highway National Scenic Byway toward Matanuska Glacier. It’s the largest glacier in Alaska accessible by an automobile and an easy two-hour drive out of Anchorage. We arrived at the scenic outlook across from the glacier but could barely see it. Unfortunately the smoky haze masked the magnificent mountains which surrounded us.

On our return to Anchorage, we had dinner at The Bridge on Ship’s Creek. Of course we had delicious fresh fish! I had silver salmon and Jeff had halibut, which were the two kinds of fish which were being caught at this time.

Ship’s Creek was a popular local fishing area. The tide was coming in so we saw several salmon fishermen.

I wish my photos were better, but the smoky haze lingered and filled the air everywhere we went.