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People, Places and Things

This is my last post on our trip to Alaska and I'll include all of the stories that I couldn't fit into any of the other posts. I decided to call it "People, Places and Things" but I was tempted to just call it "Miscellaneous" instead. As you read it, if it seems like I jump around a lot, it's because I do.

Sandy and I usually plan our trips ourselves and make all our own arrangements, but sometimes we go on guided trips. Occasionally it's nice to have everything packaged so we have done group trips with adventure travel companies like Mountain Travel-Sobek, REI Travel and CustomWalks. It's a lot easier when you don't have to worry about the logistics of traveling in a foreign country. Sometimes it's the only option for a particular trip, like staying in the lodges on the Milford Track in New Zealand or the Salcantay Trek in Peru. It usually means traveling in a group so it has a social aspect as well. It's a chance to meet and get to know people from all over the world. They tend to have similar interests too, like international travel and hiking in the mountains.

We had fifty two passengers on our Alaska cruise. Really fifty, since there was a professional wildlife photographer and her husband who were "special guests". She gave several presentations in the evening so I suspect that she wasn't a paying customer. We did get a free copy of her book, The Salmon in the Trees, which did indeed have a lot of impressive photos of Alaska and its wildlife.

Most of the people on board were Americans but there were also two couples from Canada, three from Australia, one from Kenya and one from New Zealand. The first night we had dinner with the Kiwis and learned that they lived on a farm in Otago, a region (equivalent to a state in the US) on the South Island of New Zealand. They were impressed that Sandy and I had made several trips there and actually knew the area where they lived pretty well.

One couple was traveling with two teenage kids. They wore St. Louis Cardinal gear just about all the time so they were obviously big fans. The Cardinals are major rivals of my beloved Milwaukee Brewers. I'm still bitter about the 1982 World Series. At the time the two teams were locked in a close race in the Central Division of the National League. We had some guarded conversations about baseball. We were in suspense for most of the week since there was no cell phone or internet service. When we docked in the town of Haines on the next-to-last day of the trip we could finally get updated on the baseball scores from the week.

The St. Louis fans were disappointed to learn that the Brewers had swept their series with the Diamondbacks and increased their lead over the Cardinals by several games. I was very gracious though and didn't gloat. Much.

There wasn't much political discussion on the trip. Given the heated political climate in the US at the moment that was probably a good thing. The only exception came one evening when we were sitting at the bar and I'm not sure whether it should be classified as a political or a technical disagreement anyway.

The guy next to me was carrying on about how net neutrality was a terrible socialist plot. It was going to drive every communications company out of business, screw consumers and destroy the internet. WTF? At first I thought he was just repeating some conspiracy theory he heard on InfoWars or someplace similar. I told him that I used to work in IT at a university and as an internet consumer the IT organization strongly disagreed with him. He replied that he was in the networking business and launched on a long tirade about how I was being cheated because "kids are playing video games and using way more bandwidth than you are when all you are doing is watching Netflicks but they don't have to pay for it". That would be a really convincing technical arguement except for the fact that it is totally wrong. In fact, it's completely backwards. But it was interesting because obviously he thought it would have emotional appeal to an older audience (like me and the guy on the other side of him) if we thought we had to pay for teenagers playing video games. Nothing gets people riled up like thinking someone else is getting something for nothing.

I was puzzled about why his arguments were completely backwards until he mentioned that he worked for a small company that makes equipment to allow internet providers to measure and throttle bandwidth. Ah now it made sense. I was listening to an arms dealer arguing against a peace treaty. Just as I was about to respond they announced that dinner was ready. Sandy quickly grabbed me and hauled me off to the dining room. It probably was a good thing although I told her that a bar fight between two old guys would have made a great video for her to post on Facebook.

Other than that one time I was well behaved and didn't get into trouble. I can't say the same for Sandy though.

During the orientation on the first evening one of the things the captain mentioned was that there was exercise equipment on the top deck that we were welcome to use. Sandy was diligent, at least the next morning, and was up there super early before breakfast to do a workout. During breakfast we had to listen to some lady complain to the crew that they had to do something because SOMEONE had been up early exercising and had made so much noise that it was impossible for her to sleep. Apparently her room was right under the exercise equipment. Sandy and I just ate our breakfast quietly and didn't say anything. After that Sandy never got up early to exercise. I'm not sure if she was afraid of disturbing the lady again or if she just ran out of motivation and wanted to sleep in.

It turns out that the lady who complained was That Person. You know, the one who is on every trip. One time when we were hiking and there was a bear nearby the guide asked everyone to get very close together. It was a reasonable thing to do since bears never attack large groups. Of course our friend had to wander off by herself to get better pictures of the bear. Only after some heated discussion between her and the guide did she rejoin the group.

Fortunately for her, the crew and the rest of the passengers were pretty easy going, so there were never any blowups. Everyone just stayed out of her way most of the time and ignored her when she complained. I will admit though that there was one time that I was right behind her while she was carrying on about something while we were transferring between the mother ship and the skiff that it occurred to me that she might really enjoy a Polar Plunge. You know, kind of as a surprise.

While we enjoyed meeting a lot of the others on the trip, with a group this large there are always some who are problematic. Especially this time, since the hiking wasn't central to the trip as it was on many others that we've done, there was a variety of levels of hiking ability in the group.

One day we were going to Pavlov Falls, one of the few days that we were walking on a trail. There was an older man (and when I refer to someone as older that means a lot) who had trouble with his balance when he walked. That was fine, at least he was out there, but it is also important to know your limitations. Even on the trail, which was pretty rough, he had a lot of difficulty. I know that because I was right behind him and he was struggling with every obstacle, log, rock or patch of mud, that we encountered.

Near Pavlov Falls the guides announced that they were splitting the group. Strong hikers could continue on a rougher trail to Pavlov Lake while the rest could do easy walking near the falls. I was waiting for the guy to step aside so I could zoom by him but instead he continued on the difficult route. Soon he was really having problems and the whole group slowed to a crawl. It took us forever to reach the lake.

The group took a break at the lake. Sandy and I were taking pictures and enjoying the view. Travis, our guide, was telling us about some of the wildlife in the area when the wife of the slow hiker approached him and said her husband was lying down and couldn't get up. He asked what the problem was. She explained that he had been having trouble with his balance and got really tired on the hike in.

Well maybe he just needs to rest.

"And his allergies were bothering him so he took something for it that made him really drowsy."

Ok we are wondering if he will ever be able to get up.

"And his back was hurting him so he took a pain pill."

Hmm, it's surprising that he's still conscious.

"And he took a muscle relaxant for his back too."

Wow. It's amazing that he's still breathing.

Travis radioed the other group, which had two guides. One of them hiked up to help him while the rest of us hiked back to join the other group. Somehow the two guides were able to get the hiker who was having difficulty on his feet and help him back to our pickup spot. We talked to him that evening on the ship and he said that after sleeping for a couple of hours in the afternoon he was fine. He was lucky. What he had done could have been dangerous. It was a reminder though that while being a hiking guide sounds like a fun and exciting job, sometimes it can just be a real pain in the ass, especially when people get into trouble and they should know better.

Besides those few rough spots though we did enjoy meeting and talking to the other people on the trip. Besides the passengers, there were also twenty five crew members on the boat. Over the week we got to know quite a few of them. Most of them were not native Alaskans but were from all over the US and even other countries. There was a spot in the common area where everyone's picture was posted with their name and where they from. The first thing we noticed was that Kati, the head guide, was from Boise Idaho. We looked her up the first evening and found out that her parents still lived there and she went back to visit them often. Later that night she even gave a "Go Broncos!" cheer at the orientation when she introduced herself. When we were talking about hiking in Idaho, I was suprised when she told us that she was planning her first ever trip to Stanley later this summer with Riki, another crew member who was from Hailey, Idaho. I had to tease her that I had doubts about a hiking guide who grew up in Idaho but had never been to the Sawtooths. We did hike with her a couple of times though and she did a great job, as did all of the guides.

At the end of the cruise when we got off the boat in Juneau, the car parked right in front of the dock had Idaho 1A plates. Idaho license plates have a county code and 1A is for Ada County, where Boise is located. Hmm. I bet I know who's car it was.

We learned that most of the crew had an interesting lifestyle. They ranged in age from early twenties to early forties with most of them about thirty. Their work for UnCruise was seasonal. The Alaska cruises only run five or six months out of the year, so all of them lived and worked in other parts of the country for the rest of the year. Nicki, for example, guided snorkeling trips in Florida during the winter while Travis worked on kayak tours in Baja California. Surprisingly though most of them had worked for UnCruise for several seasons. Nicki was the only guide that we talked to who was in her first year.

Their work schedule was interesting too. The cruise was a week long and naturally everyone worked every day. The ship arrived in port at the end of the trip early in the morning. The passnegers left after breakfast - everyone was probably gone by ten. At that point there is probably a lot of work needed to get the ship cleaned up and resupplied and ready for another trip. When that was done the crew might get a few hours off to spend in town. We did run into the captain of our ship in downtown Juneau the afternoon we got there. They don't have long though before they have to be back - the new passengers board about five that evening. Then the ship leaves again as soon as everyone is onboard and the whole cycle starts over again.

Since the crew never really gets a day off while they're on the ship, they work a four weeks on and two weeks off schedule. It seems like it would make living arrangements tricky. They live on the ship while they are working and leave at the end of the season, so I doubt that any of them actually own or rent places to live in Alaska. Kati told us that after her four weeks she usually flew back to Boise and spent her two weeks off visiting her parents. I suspect most people either stayed somewhere locally with friends or traveled somewhere when they weren't working.

It seems like it would be a nomadic life. I doubt that you would own a house or even rent an apartment long term. Your career growth would be limited. Most of the guides were committed to their work though and really seemed to enjoy it. Most of them had college degrees, usually in biology or environmental studies or some similar field. They had alternatives and this is what they had chosen to do.

Relationships would be tricky too. We did notice several shipboard romances. One of the stewards, Pua, told us she was looking forward all week to the day we would stop in Haines. Her boyfriend was on our sister ship, the Wilderness Explorer, which would be in port the same day. She was hoping to get to see him for a few hours. On the day we got off the ship we ran into two more crew members at our hotel - Ashley, the head steward and Jake, one of the deckhands. They were just catching a taxi to the airport to leave on a vacation together.

It definitely seems exotic to work on adventure trips in Alaska. I think it might be fun for a few years but I'm too practical ( or maybe just too stodgy) to do it as a career myself.

It wasn't just the crew either. We had dinner one night with Ranger Patrick, the Park Service ranger who joined our crusie for three days. He went ashore with us on hikes during the day, gave talks on the ship in the evening and was generally around to answer questions. His job was seasonal too. He told us that for six months of the year he lives in Mequon, Wisconsin. It's a suburb of Milwaukee (which is where I grew up). When I asked why he didn't live somewhere out west where there are more mountains, and more national parks, he said that he had family in Wisconsin and liked ice fishing there in the winter. Personally I think it's weird that someone would live in Wisconsin because they liked the winters so much but hey, to each their own.

Since we stayed at Glacier Bay Lodge for a few days the week after the cruise, we made a point of stopping by to say hello to Patrick while he was working the desk at the visitor center.

If I thought that ice fishing was a little too cold to appeal to me, it was nothing compared to the Polar Plunge. It was one of the special events that they had during the cruise, an opportunity to dive (very briefly) into the frigid waters of Glacier Bay. I'm not sure what the water temperature was but there were glaciers calving into the water and lots of ice floating all around the ship. Amazingly there were several takers. The two Australian couples did it. Ok, that's not too surprising. Aussies are all pretty crazy. There were three other passengers and one of the crew members who did it as well. One of the older guys who took the plunge wore a life jacket. "I don't want to drown if I have a cardiac arrest when I hit the water". Ok. Good to know that he is safety conscious. One of the Australians even did it twice. I guess he thought that it was fun. Sandy and I were content to watch. They did draw quite a crowd for the event.

After the Polar Plunge, they pulled a big piece of ice out of the water and set it up in the dining room. The ice was sitting on a metal rack, like a dish drying rack, with about one inch spacing between the wires. They declared a contest to see who could guess when the ice would fall through the rack. We could write our name and our guess for the time on a board mounted on the wall. They said that they would monitor the ice block day and night to determine the exact time that it fell.

It was a fair size piece of ice, as big as a large purse or a small daypack. It was going to last quite a while. Being a physics major, I was trying to calculate in my head what it's volume was, how fast it was melting and when it would be small enough to slip through the grate. Eventually I came up with a time of about ten hours, which would be about three in the morning. It seemed like a reasonable estimate. A lot of other people thought so too as most of the entries were in the early morning hours.

When we came down for breakfast the next morning the piece of ice was still there. In fact quite a bit of it was still there. As soon as I saw it I realized that I had been a complete idiot. Yeah, I knew that there is a crew member on the bridge twenty four hours a day but that doesn't mean that they were going to have someone sit in the dining room all night watching a piece of ice melt. I'm sure that they do this contest every week and know just how large a piece of ice they have to pick out so that it will last until the next morning. And to be safe, they probably pick one a little bigger than they think they need. So not even seeing it, you would guess that it would probably last a couple of hours extra, or until about noon the next day. In the end, it fell through just after 1 pm, or right about when you would have expected it. So much for the usefulness of an undergraduate physics degree.

The next day was our one variation from the adventure cruise theme. Unlike most cruises, we spent our days in activities like hiking or kayaking. We didn't spend all day docked in a port, except for our last full day when we stopped in Haines. I guess it's the one town that UnCruise likes because the Wilderness Explorer, our sister ship which was on a trip similar to ours, was there too. It was like seeing double. The two ships are virtually identical so we were careful that when we returned from town we got back on the right ship.

Haines bills itself as the "adventure capital of Alaska". It's a small town with a population of about fourteen hundred people. The town is somewhat unusual for Southeastern Alaska. Along with nearby Skagway, there is actually a a through road that connects it to Canada. As we walked around town we saw a lot of cars with license plates from the nearby Yukon and even a few from Northwest Territories. I don't know that I had ever seen either one before. There were even a few that had come all the way from the lower forty eight.

There are several hikes near Haines including some you can do right from town, although that made them quite long. Since it was an overcast day we just spent the morning wandering around the town. We walked along the waterfront to the town's main street (which was quite a long way) where there were a number of shops. We returned to the boat for lunch and then did it all again in the afternoon. We also toured around Ft. Seward, a retired army post that was important in territorial days. So even though we didn't do a real hike we certainly go in our quota of steps for the day.

I think the crew was happy to be able to get off the ship for a few hours too. We saw a number of them walking around town. We even saw that Pua was able to meet up with her boyfriend like she had hoped.

In Haines we also got a graphic demonstration of just how large the tides can be in Southeastern Alaska. When we got off the ship in the morning, we took one of the skiffs to shore. Although we were tied up at the cruise ship dock, there was no way we could reach it. The walkway was ten or twelve feet above the upper deck of our ship. When we came back to the ship for lunch, they were at the same level and we just walked across a gangway. I was wondering if I could be mistaken so I asked Laura, the boatswain who was helping people across the gangway. She confirmed that I remembered correctly. She said that in the morning she had to climb up to the dock (there were ladder steps on the dock pillars) to tie off the mooring lines and it had been at least twelve feet. That's an incredible change in sea level in just a few hours. It was hard to believe even though I had seen it myself.

I think I've covered just about everything of interest that happened during both our cruise and our stay the following week at Glacier Bay Lodge, so I'm going to fast forward to the last day of our trip. After taking the ferry back from Glacier Bay Lodge we had one more full day before flying home. The weather had been perfect the evening we got back to Juneau so we wanted to make the most of it on our last day. One option we considered was taking the Mt. Roberts tram again and this time hiking all the way to the summit. That would have been spectacular. Some people on the cruise said they had done it (the kids from the Cardinal fan family) so we knew the route was snow free all the way. I also viewed it as unfinished business since we had turned back after going part way. When I attempt a summit and fail it really bugs me until I can go back and successfully complete the climb. With such good weather we should have no problem bagging Mt. Roberts.

As much as I wanted to climb Mt. Roberts, we decided to do something else - take a scenic plane flight. Wings Airways was conveniently close by. They operated from a dock on the waterfront only a block from our hotel. Their seaplanes took off and landed right in Juneau harbor. The airplane rides were pricey but it was the only way to get a close up look at the big peaks around the Juneau icefield. We got a tantalizing view of those mountains in the distance as we had approached Juneau on the ferry the evening before. We thought it would be worth it and it turned out that we were right.

When we got up the next morning the sky was still perfectly clear. It was a rare opportunity that was too good to pass up. After a quick breakfast we rushed over and signed up for their first scenic flight departure which was at 10 am. We didn't want to give the weather any chance to deteriorate. This was Alaska after all.

The signature trip offered by Wings Airways was a half day trip to Taku Lodge, an isolated resort that is only twenty miles from Juneau as the bush plane flies but is not accessible any other way. It combines a scenic flight with lunch at the lodge - a chance to get off the grid. Since we had spent the last three days at Glacier Bay Lodge, we had just gotten BACK on the grid. We opted for the scenic tour only, a forty minute flight over the Juneau Icefield.

Wings Airways runs quite an operation. They had five airplanes going out all at once so we were divided into groups of ten or less. Our group was designated as the Wolverines, which Sandy didn't much care for since she is a Badger and proud of it. Just before 10 oclock, the five planes landed, bringing people back who had stayed at the lodge overnight as well as their baggage and some cargo (which was mostly trash from the looks of it). I was taking video as the planes landed so we ended up at the back of our group as we boarded the plane. I figured that meant I would probably get the crummiest seat.

The planes were DeHavilland Otters, an outstanding short take off and landing aircraft with room for...nine passengers. There were five couples in our group and we were the last ones. When I hesitated as I was getting on because I didn't see anywhere to sit, the pilot said "the right seat up front is open". Ha! I felt like I was in that old Bob Uecker commercial for Miller Lite as I went up to the cockpit. "I must be in the front row."

After we were all buckled in and the pilot did his checks we were ready to go. All five planes took off one after another. (No, I wasn't having an out of body experience when I took the video. I just filmed the group that left after we got back. Same same.) We flew south down the Gasteneau Channel, then climbed up and over the mountains to the east of Juneau. I got a chance to see the summit of Mt. Roberts up pretty close after all.

Then we flew out over the Juneau Icefield. It covers fifteen hundred square miles and is surrounded by amazing rock peaks. Thirty eight glaciers flow out of the icefield, including the Mendenhall Glacier, which we had visited at the begining of our trip, and the Taku Glaicer, which we flew over later in the flight. We had beautiful weather and the flight was breathtaking. I had the primo view too, sitting up front in the copilots seat instead of back in the "cheap seats". I could try to describe it but I couldn't do it justice. Instead, watch this short video and look at the pictures I've included in this post.

After two weeks of great adventures and incredible scenery, the icefield flight was the perfect way to cap it off. We had been smart to take the first flight too. By the time we took off a few high clouds had already formed but we still had blue skies and perfect light for our flight.

We spent the rest of the day shopping in Juneau. We picked up a bunch of stuff, souvenirs for ourselves and a lot of gifts for family and friends. Basically, we bought as many tshirts as I thought I could fit in our luggage. We had lunch at the Alaskan Crepe Escape. It was just a small stand along the waterfront. Every time we had gone by before it had been closed but we finally got to eat there on our last day.

And that was our Alaska trip. We had a great time. We saw a lot of beautiful scenery, encountered fantastic wildlife and had a lot of great adventures. Southeast Alaska is different than any other place I have ever visited, much wilder and more remote. We covered the area around Juneau and Glacier Bay pretty well on this trip so I'm not sure I would go back there again but the trip did get me excited about seeing more of Alaska, like Denali National Park or the Kenai Peninsula. Alaska is a big place and there is a lot more of it to discover.