KT's Alaska Cruise 2010 Photos

Tuesday, August 3:

We entered Glacier Bay. The hills on the southern half of the Bay are green; you don't start seeing snow and ice till you get further up.
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A Coast Guard boat brought aboard a park ranger to give announcements and describe what we were seeing as we cruised up the Bay.
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The bow, normally kept closed, was opened to sightseers.
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It was cloudy in the morning, but it cleared up later in the day.
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Alaska was also visited by sightseers from OUTER SPACE!
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After a while, we started seeing glaciers. Here's Reid Glacier.
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People relaxing on deck and glacierwatching.
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Soon we saw Lamplugh Glacier, all big and cracky and full of blue ice and black dirt.
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Then we peeked around a corner and saw Johns Hopkins Inlet, ending at the foot of Johns Hopkins Glacier.
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Computer, enhance.
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There were other ships and boats in the Bay, either sightseeing like us or fishing or doing scientific research.
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Here's another Holland America ship, the Statendam.
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The lido pool is heated. It was odd to see people in parkas and windbreakers on the deck, and kids in swimsuits mere feet below them.
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A cruise ship leaves an impressive wake.
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Even this far north in Glacier Bay, there is greenery...
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...and flocks of birds.
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Next, we headed up Tarr Inlet. At the north end, we saw Margerie Glacier.
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The water's not polluted; that's glacial sediment.
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Mom eventually got tired of doing nothing but staying in her tiny cramped cabin all day, so her relatives rented her a wheelchair and pushed her around.
Here she is up on deck to see the glaciers.
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Shirley and Mom.
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Sis. (Again, that's her name; she's not my sister.)
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Glaciers calve from time to time. This means a big chunk falls off the foot of the glacier with a loud rumbling sound like thunder, falls into the water, breaks up and floats away. If you look closely, just barely to the right of dead center, you can see a splash of water that I just caught as a chunk calved off.
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Ripples started spreading out where the ice chunk fell.
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Eww, birds like to swim in dirty water and stand on dirty ice!
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Margerie Glacier in dramatic lighting.
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Uncle Dave, who is probably looking at the other major glacier at the north end of Tarr Inlet...
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...the Grand Pacific Glacier, which is all black for some reason.
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The north end of Tarr Inlet is the northernmost point in the world that I've been to. Eventually we turned around and started heading south, back out to sea.
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On to Wednesday