As luck would have it there was one place in town that was listed in the yellow pages as a muffler repair shop. We called them early Monday morning (the next day as luck would have it) and they told us to come on down and they’d look at it right away. We motored on down and they fixed it right away (they cut it off where it was bent and welded on a new section) and only charged us $50! Another bullet dodged!
Now back to our regular programing. After backing into the rock we went to check out the view from the day use area at Mendenhall Lake Campground where we were staying. The weather wasn’t great but you could still see the glacier and a bit of the mountains behind it.
We drove further west to the trailhead for the West Glacier Trail and got to see a group of tourists get ready to take a rafting trip across the lake and down Mendenhall Creek. From the viewpoint there you could see Nugget Falls.
Here it is closeup and personal through my zoom lens.
And there were nice views of the ice bergs floating in the lake.
It was late afternoon and we thought that the crowds of cruise ship passengers might be gone by this point from the Visitor’s Center at the Mendenhall Glacier so we took the short drive there (basically around the lake and the nearby housing developments). There were a few buses there but it wasn’t crowded so we made our way into the Visitor’s Center. They had a nice chunk of glacial ice for people to touch and look at (they’d fished it out of the lake the day before) and some nice displays on Climate Change. The Mendenhall Glacier has been retreating for many years. When I visited here in 1967 the glacier was right next to the Visitor’s Center. Now it has retreated across the lake and Nugget Falls (which used to be under the glacier) is now well in front of the glacier. This is a photo taken from the Visitor’s Center. Nugget Falls is on the right.
In 1967 the glacier went all the way in front of the falls and the large hill and almost down to photo point, that green peninsula at the bottom middle above. These two photos just give you a slightly different angle on the glacier way back when.
After wandering around the Visitor’s Center we took the short hike out to Photo Point to take more pictures. Here you could get great shots of the ice bergs. Isn’t that aqua blue wonderful? It kind of looks fake (like a blob of Crest toothpaste) but that’s the real color.
You also got a much closer view of the glacier itself. It turns out we were lucky that it was cloudy. The blue in the glacier shows up better in photos that are taken on cloudy days.
Here’s a close up of the glacial ice and a big ice berg in the foreground.
Usually you can hike on the beach here but it was closed because there were Arctic Terns nesting. I used my zoom lens to get a shot of this one sitting on it’s sandy nest.
Along the trail back to the Visitor’s Center there were wildflowers with signs identifying them. I got to get this photo of Northern Broomcone (Boschniakia rossica). It’s a parasitic plant and not a cone at all.
I also saw my first instance of Pink Flowered Wintergreen (Pyrola asarifolia) here. I kept seeing it over and over again on the trip after this.
The next day after we got the tailpipe fixed we drove “out the road” as the locals call it. What this means is that we drove north on the Glacier Highway, the one and only highway in town. We hadn’t been driving long when we noticed some folks stopped along side of the road—a good sign of Wildlife Alert. We slowed down and what should we see but a black bear across the road eating dandelions in the ditch. I got out and used the hood of the truck to hide behind to shoot photos.
But then the bear decided that the grass was greener on the other side of the road! So I hopped back into the truck right quick and shot this photo through the windshield which is why it’s a little green.
He settled down to munch in the ditch on our side of the road and I could take pictures then out the side window.
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| Dandelions must be very tasty, don’t you think? | |
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We were close enough I could hear him munching along. It was quite a thrill. We heard later that he’d been out on this stretch of the road every day for about a week. In fact, there was a photo of him on the front page of the Juneau newspaper the next morning munching away.
A little ways along we had to wait about 20 minutes for a construction delay. I got out and took this photo of the mountains with a cruise ship cruising by. They get 4 to 5 cruise ships a day in Juneau all summer long. That’s a whole lot of tourists in a town of only 32,000. At least they have the Mendenhall Glacier and it’s ice field to show them. They offer helicopter rides out to the ice field when the weather permits. One morning during our stay we got to listen to one helicopter after another flying up over us on their way to the ice field.
There was a nice waterfall next to the road.
And there were flowers in bloom next to the the creek that it fed, including lots of this Creeping Buttercup(Ranunculus repens) that was alive with bugs whose job must be to pollinate them.
There were also Alpine forget-me-nots (Myosotis alpestris), Alaska's state flower.
And our old favorite, cow parsnip (Heracleum lanatum).
We drove out to the end of the road looking for a trailhead we’d heard about but we couldn’t find the sign. Trails in Alaska we’ve found tend not to be well marked and if there are signs they’ve often times been shot up so much that you can’t read them. That was okay. The sun had come out—this part of the road is in a rain shadow and tends to be sunnier than Juneau proper. So we stopped at this lovely little cove that turns out to be named Sunshine Cove.
We had lunch and then took the trail down to the beach and out to that rocky little point that you can see in the right hand photo below.
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And huge cow parsnip in full bloom too.
I stopped to take a picture of the view about half way out since the mountains were really beginning to show.
I finally got a photo of false lily of the valley (Maianthemum dilatatum) in bloom too!
And let's not forget that there were lots of Nootka lupine in bloom too.
When we got out to the end of the spit there were what appeared to be white sea gulls out on the rocks.
But the zoom lens shows you that they have light grey backs. They’re Glaucous-winged gulls according to my bird book.
Even better there were these crazy black and white ducks who would dive in a line pop, pop, pop and then appear again on the surface in the same order, pop, pop, pop. They were great fun to watch.
They turned out to be Harlequin Ducks.
Here’s the view from the end of the spit with Walter sitting on a rock looking out to sea. He was watching the fishing boats trying to figure what they were doing.
We had to wait again for construction and this time there were locals in line who had been out with their boat. You saw Walter in his coat and hat, right? It was in the high 50’s maybe with sun breaks. And here is a local in classic Juneau attire complete with Juneau Sneakers—he thought it was warm.
The sun continued to come out and we stopped for a shot of the mountains across the bay. Earlier the clouds had been hanging low enough you couldn’t see those mountains. Now, wow!
Here’s the view looking south with a cove and marina in the foreground. That mountain is part of the cause of the rain shadow we’re in right now.
It sure looked to us like we were going to have a nice late afternoon and evening. But by the time we got back to Mendenhall Lake it was cloudy and grey again. The photos I took that afternoon of the glacier look like they’re in black and white.
In Part XIII, we’ll take you on another day’s worth of adventures in Juneau before catching our last ferry on to Haines and the rest of Alaska.