Monday, July 14


Today we sailed almost all the way down the Lynn Canal, from Haines to Juneau . Two days later we happened to be driving along the coast just at the time that our ferry, the Malaspina, sailed by, so I'll post that picture here. We saw lots of glaciers along the way, on both sides; I particularly like the one pictured here, which I'll call "Slalom glacier;" I have no idea what its real name is. We also got a good look at the Eldred Rock lighthouse, the oldest original lighthouse building in Alaska, built in 1906 in response to all the ships that wrecked on this rock on their way to Skagway, particularly the SS Clara Nevada in 1898.


Juneau is the only stop on our itinerary that we visited four years ago, but this year's experience will be totally different. Then we stayed at a motel in the center of the city; this time we are camped north of the city in the U.S. Forest Service's beautiful Mendenhall Lake campground, and we have our own wheels. After checking in, we revisited the Mendenhall Glacier and learned that it had retreated 500 feet in the past year. In the film that they show at the visitor center, which was made ten years ago, they said that the average annual retreat was 60 feet. The glaciers have been retreating for the past 250 years; that is part of the natural cycle of warming and cooling of the earth. But there can be no question that our human activity has greatly accelerated what nature had in mind.