We cruised through Glacier Bay National Park on both cruises. It was just as beautiful and awesome the second time.

This is Lamplugh Glacier in the John Hopkins Inlet of Glacier Bay.

Check out the waterfalls inside the tunnel.

This is entering Tarr Inlet. You can see Margerie Glacier on the left and Grand Pacific Glacier (the black one) on the right. The black coloring is the rocks and "rock flour" carried along by the ice.

We got to see the ice calving, huge chucks of the glacier falling into the water. The sound of cracking preceded the ice breaking away. The sound was incredible.

We took the train ride from Skagway (on the return cruise) which traveled along the Trail of 98, Klondike Highway.

Originally, this was just a small path used by the hopeful seeking gold. The Canadian Mounties required that they carry 2000 pounds of provisions before entering Canada's Yukon Territory (this was supposed to be a year's worth of supplies). Look close to see the path. It usually took them 50 trips to get all 2000 pounds to the summit; then they had another 50 trips down the other side of the mountain. Imagine traveling along this tiny path, with your horse or mule loaded down with supplies.

Carcross Desert in Yukon Territory is the smallest desert in the world. We never expected to see a desert in the Yukon Territory!

This is our new puppy (we wish!). It's one of the future sleddogs used in the Yukon Territory.

Snowplowing along the railroad tracks was done by rotary snowplow pushed along the tracks by two coal-fired engines.

Skagway was a quaint little town -- accessible by road from Canada to the north, about 2 hours to the Trans Canada highway.

The pipeline is for electricity -- there are lots of waterfalls for power in these mountains. Click on the plaque to enlarge it for reading.

We took a 3 hour bus tour along the roadway into Canada, which runs along the Klondike Trail (Trail of 98), used during the goldrush. The is the highway bridge built over a fault line -- the fourth bridge; hopefully they got it right this time.

While in Juneau on the return cruise, we took Big Red for a whale watch tour. We saw orcas, humpbacks, seals, otters and lots of eagles. The eagles were everywhere -- many standing on the shore, perched on the pilings and flying over the boat, just like the seagulls would do in Florida. There were several pods of humpbacks, and they were bubble feeding -- they surround the fish and blow bubbles to get them into a tight group, then the feeding frenzy starts. Unfortunately, the orcas were never close to the boat, but I included some pics of them anyway. We even got to hear to hear their calls as they were feeding.

These first three pictures are some of the orkas we saw.

These are the humpback whales.