There were several cruise ships in town but most of the folks seem to have gone on excursions so there weren’t a ton of pedestrians wandering around like there were in Ketchikan. However there were a few people walking out Basin road towards the Last Chance Mine—it’s only a half a mile from downtown—including this guy who tried to ignore everyone else. If you look carefully to below his left ear, you can see a blue ear tag. That means he’s had an unsavory encounter with people before. So he was working real hard to be invisible while munching down on dandelions.
There were also some nice waterfalls.
We parked in a lot that serves not only the mine but the Perseverance Tail which we were planning on hiking later in the afternoon. To get to the mining museum you have to walk down the hill, through the bushes, through another parking lot (with lots of small tour buses, uh oh) and over a bridge. As we walked over the bridge we realized that there weren’t going to be a herd of people at the museum. The tourists were out in Gold Creek panning for GOLD. And it looked like some of them had a bad case of Gold Fever.
It was raining lightly but they didn’t seem to care. I was never sure what the two clusters of folks were doing—panning in warmer water? Looking at their new found treasures? Listening to instructions on how to pan? Who knows? Walter was especially tickled by this sight. He’d read an ad for a tour where they assured you that they provided warm water for panning and he had thought that was just a bit much. Ah the joys of tourism in Alaska.
The view up creek was really lovely. With a nice avalanche chute that feeds the creek.
And more waterfalls coming down the canyon walls.
The Last Chance Mine was once the world’s largest hard rock gold mine. There are more miles of tunnels in the mine than in all of roads in all the Juneau area combined. The museum is a wonderful dusty collection of mining stuff but it’s not particularly well organized. You just have to wander around and look at the stuff. Their big claim to fame is this huge compressor that ran all the tools in the mine. It’s the biggest one Ingersoll Rand ever made.
We wandered around and talked with the wonderfully entertaining lady who runs the museum (and lives on site as resident caretaker with her husband, the harbor engineer) along with her cat and this big white dog who barked and barked when we arrived so it must have worn him out.
My wildflower book swears this field chickweed (Cerastium arvense) that I saw on the trail, is a wildflower so here you go. Others may consider it a weed but it's pretty in any case.
We wandered back over the bridge with the thought of taking a hike. By this time, it was raining pretty hard and neither of us were really up for a steady uphill slog in the wet. So horrors of horrors, we bagged it and went and did our grocery shopping instead!
Later in the afternoon, after lunch and a nap we drove back over to the trailhead at the West Glacier Trail on the far side of Mendenhall Lake and took it out a ways. There was a ladies running group out for a trail run and we got to dodge them and the puddles the whole way. I’ve never been on such a heavily used trail on a weekday. There were also folks coming back from guided hikes out to the Juneau Ice Fields, complete with ice axes hanging off their backpacks.
Everything in Juneau was pretty mossy. In fact, the ground in the woods around our campsite was entirely moss covered, something I hadn’t seen anywhere before. It turns out that last summer the glacier calved so much that the lake overflowed and flooded the campground. That might have something to do with it.
The next morning we were supposed to be at the ferry dock at 5 am. Yes, you read that right. We got up before 4 and rolled out just after they opened the campground gates at 4:30 to let out all of us heading for the ferry that morning. You should be glad you weren’t with us, I’m more than a little cranky that early in the morning. We checked in and got ourselves in line for our last ferry ride of the trip. Then we had breakfast. Much better.
Here's a map of the ferry route.
View Larger Map
It was cloudy again and raining a bit. Nothing new there. But the clouds began to lift a bit as we went along. Our first major sighting of this trip was this lovely lighthouse. This is Sentinel Island Lighthouse, an Art Deco tower replacing the original lighthouse that was built here in 1901—one of the very first to operate in Alaska.
Then the clouds lifted enough that we could actually see some mountain tops! It was really exciting since so much of this trip we knew there were mountain tops out there but couldn’t see them.
Another lighthouse showed up sitting out on a little island. It’s called the Eldred Rock Lighthouse. It was built in 1905 and is the oldest original lighthouse remaining in Alaska.
Not long before we reached Haines we spied a glacier coming down the mountainside.
We got closer and my zoom did the rest.
This is the Davidson Glacier. It feeds off the same ice field that feeds the many glaciers in Glacier Bay National Park which is on the west side of these mountains. I took a whole series of photos of it as we got closer and closer and this gives you the best view before the bottom of the glacier disappears behind the islands in the foreground.
By the time we got to Haines, the sun had started to peek out and there were patches of blue showing.
We got into Haines at 11:30 and set up camp at the Haines Hitch-up RV Park on the edge of town. It was nearly empty and we had a whole section to ourselves. Later in the season they’re known to be all booked up so we were lucky.
Here’s the view looking south from the door of the trailer.
Haines is a pretty small town and I felt sorry for the few tourists off the one cruise ship who we saw wandering around town. There really isn’t much to do in town. But outside of town is another matter entirely. Haines has two state parks to explore and quite a bit of road to drive. After lunch, we drove out to Chilkat State Park. Here’s the view from the Chilkat Road.
The road winds up into the hills and then goes DOWNHILL into Chilkat State Park until you reach a lovely overlook that someone had taken the time to keep clear of trees so you could actually see the view. Those are the Chilkat Mountains across Chilkat Inlet. On the west side of the mountains is Glacier Bay National Park. You just can’t get there from here though. It’s a long expensive process to get to Glacier Bay and back and we opted to give it a pass.
On the far left of the photo is Davidson Glacier which we saw earlier in the day from the ferry. Here’s what it looks like from the viewpoint at Chilkat State Park.
It took me a while to realize that this was the same one we’d seen earlier. But with a little research it’s pretty clear, it’s the same glacier just from a different angle.
Hanging in the mountains just north of Davidson is Rainbow Glacier.
You can see some of the blue glacial ice, though most of it is still covered with winter snow. It’s called Rainbow because later in the season when the sun shines on it there are supposed to be lots of colors like rainbows. At this point, you could see two long ribbon waterfalls coming down off the glacier and down the face of the mountain.
The sunny day got me playing with the camera and I shot this photo of us reflected in the not very clean windows of the little cabin at the viewpoint. It’s not great but you get the idea. We were a couple of happy campers.
Here’s Walter in front of the Davidson Glacier with his hat out of his eyes for a change.
Down below the viewing platform there were bunches and bunches of bunchberry (Cornus canadensis).
On the drive back to town we stopped at this little cove where the old fish cannery was. It was such a pretty view I couldn’t resist.
In Part XIV, we’ll finish up our visit to Haines and then start the drive into the Yukon and the rest of the way North to Alaska.