Day 4: Juneau

Juneau was my favorite so this post is ridiculously long.
This was my first glimpse of Juneau from my balcony.
I was instantly impressed.

The first thing we did was go whale-watching.
Everyone had cool cameras. I was jealous.
Oh- please note my mom's face in this picture.
Was she yawning or something?

Sea lions! The difference between a seal and a sea lion is a flap of skin over the ear. Sea lions have it and seals don't, which confuses me because you'd think the flap would form a "seal" over the animal's ear. The naturalist lady called them "the sausages of the sea" which I thought was rather rude.

Here's your whale-watching lesson.
First you watch for the blow hole spray,then you watch for his back,

then if he's diving, you watch for his tail.
Now you know.

We saw lots and lots of humpbacks.
This smooth part of the water is caused by the water displacement from such a huge animal diving down really quickly. Pretty cool. Ooh, pretty.After the whales we went to see Mendenhall Glacier. We went for a little walk first to see if there were any salmon running in the stream. There were plenty of them. They turn bright red right before they spawn (then die) so they're easy to spot.
Can you find the bear in this tree?
You can only see his little foot hanging down.This is Mendenhall GlacierThis is Mendenhall up close through the telescope thing.

This is a picture taken in the 40's at the same spot as the picture above.

Mendenhall is going away pretty quickly.Bryan always had the binoculars.
We're not really sure what he was looking for in this picture.

After the glacier thing Bryan and I went up this tram thing.
This is a picture of our boat from the tram.
It's huge. It's 15 stories high.
It has everything - golf, basketball, giant chess, 4 pools, etc.

This is a sick eagle at an eagle rescue place.
She was sad because she can't fly anymore.

I hiked the rest of the way up Mount Roberts while we were up there.
The first 500 feet was a marked and maintained trail.
These were the trail markers.

I met those guys and we talked for a while next to that cross that some Jesuits put there.
They thought I was crazy because I was hiking in sandals (chacos) and told me that I wouldn't be able to do that when I was old like them. They were fun.Juneau

It was some good hiking
These rocks used to be horizontal.
This is also when I realized that I was at the alpine line.I don't really know what was up with these trees.
Probably an earthquake.
There are lots of earthquakes in Alaska.

It really is a rainforest.

We found this cool sun dial.
We didn't find any sun.

I really wanted this hat.
It got vetoed.

This is midnight in Juneau.
Check out how glassy the water is.