June 2010

Alaska,

This has been my all time favorite vacation!!!! I would do this again in a heart beat! We went on this trip with our good friends Sterling and Sherilee. This is Ketchikan Alaska, we took a week cruise on the Oosterdam (Holland America) cruise ship. Very classy! We stopped in Juno, Ketchikan, Sitka and British Columbia. This glacier is receding so fast that if we were there when the visitors center was built in the eighty's we would have been standing on the glacier. The one thing I will tell you is, if glaciers interest you at all I would start exploring them now as all but a few of the ones close to us, are disappearing quickly. It was so amazing!

We were always wet and it was cold, but that is why I wore two pairs of pants and plenty of layers up top. (Although I do run cold, as you can tell looking at Taylor and Sterling they don't seem to be bothered much by the weather.) These photos were taken from the boat as we were traveling up a fjord.

We were hearing lots of cracking and watching the small boat size pieces fall into the water. I happened to take this picture and the next one as a piece the size of a large fishing boat came crashing into the water. It was so large that it made our ship rock pretty seriously even though we were quite the distance from the glacier. We were so lucky to see that much calving while we were there. We were told, generally you don't see that large of a piece come off but maybe once a season.

If you compare the two pictures you can see the crack were it is beginning to pull away.