Hubbard Glacier

As our Alaskan cruise continued, my wife, Sharon, woke me in the early morning. Our ship was sailing into Disenchantment Bay, home of Hubbard Glacier. It was drizzly, foggy, cool, and too early for me to rush awake. Sharon went up on deck and I followed later.

Hubbard Glacier is North America's largest tidewater glacier. A tidewater glacier is one that travels far enough to reach the sea. The origins of Hubbard are back up in the Yukon about 75 miles and it is still advancing. The face of the glacier is 6 miles long and 300-500 feet high. A lot more is under the water. It is HUGE! Our ship, Celebrity's Summit, was dwarfed by this 50 story high chunk of ice. We "parked" about a mile from Hubbard, but because of its size, it looked like you could almost reach out and touch it. When we saw a sea bird fly by our ship toward the glacier and almost disappear as it neared the face, we gained a little perspective!

For our best view we were allowed to go to the front of the ship to the helicopter landing pad. There, facing the glacier, a Tlingit naturalist (who Sharon & I had met and become friends with in Hoonah, our previous stop) told us all about Hubbard. The ice has a blueish tinge as did many of the glaciers we had seen earlier. I think this is caused by the air in the ice being pressed out by the pressures of the glacier. The color seems more evident under cloudy skies than sunny. A lot of the glacier's surface is heavily crevassed and fissured. Again, the size of these jagged cracks and convolutions was hard to comprehend until we saw them dwarfing full size spruce trees near the glacier edges. All glaciers also have dirt/gravel they have up heaved incorporated throughout their ice. Some appear "dirtier" than others like the smaller glacier to the side of Hubbard.

Viewing Hubbard Glacier was almost like a religious experience for me. Here we are, in the middle of nowhere, all by ourselves (well, 2500 other passengers too), in a slight drizzle, with fog shrouding the tops of the mountains, in front of a massive, thousands of years old example of nature, and it is perfectly silent. The silence would occasionally be disrupted by a reverberating "crack" or a distant rumble like thunder. Never quite heard sounds like that before. These sounds were Hubbard expanding and contracting. Like the old man he is, he creaks like my old knees. We kept a sharp eye because some of these cracks and moans meant calving (ice falling into the sea from the face of a glacier). Because of the size of Hubbard, though, by the time the sound got to the ship, the calving had already occurred. Did I mention that Hubbard is big? Live the World!

Skagway

After Juneau, the next stop for Celebrity Cruise Line's Summit was Skagway. As with all areas of this country, there were indigenous people before the arrival of "us." In the case of Skagway it was the Tlingit (kling-kit) people. Skagway's beginning after "us" was, again, the gold rush but for a little different reason than the gold found around Juneau. Skagway was the entrance to the gold of the Yukon.

Having a deep harbor and located at the beginning of an easy (?) way through the mountains (now known as White Pass), Skagway was the perfect jumping off point for the prospectors heading into Canada in the late 1890's. Using Tlingit trails and later a narrow gauge train, those seeking their fortunes could traverse the mountains into Canada up to Bennett Lake where they could pick up the Yukon River for their final destination; the Klondike. Sharon & I took an excursion that retraced these step; the White Pass Train.

Now used mostly as a tourist attraction, the White Pass Train takes you up through the mountains above the timberline to the "top" at Frazer. We went WAY up! Two non-cruise tourists got off at an intermediate stop to backpack and camp near a glacier. (I think one of them was Grizzly Adams!) The train went through tunnels and over long tresses (which I hoped had been strengthened since the 1890's!) as we made the slow, switchback climb to the top. Of course, beautiful scenery! When we got to Frazer we were in the Yukon of Canada. Before disembarking, several Canadian Mountain Police boarded the train checking our passports. After a little rest at the top and a lot of picture taking, most people took the train back down to Skagway. Sharon & I were on a different package; we took bicycles back down. (There's a road through the pass now!)

Going downhill all the way for miles is my idea of bicycling! Kind of reminded us of the bike trip down the volcano Haleakala in Maui only Sharon & I were in the mountains this time. We went in small groups, with two guides, protective headgear, and a lot of safety precautions outlined to us. We weren't allowed to ride too close to the edge of the road, for some reason. The group made frequent stops for picture taking. There is a small guard house at the U.S./Canada border. All of us had to stop our bikes, get our documentation checked, and our passports stamped as we re-entered the states. Probably mostly for show, but it was fun! We didn't lose anyone to rogue bears and we didn't hit any moose, but my travel agent (Sharon) was always taking up the rear.

The people of Skagway have purposely tried to preserve the historical look of the gold rush days. Over 100 buildings have been refurbished in their original style. At its peak around 1898 the population of Skagway was between 8000-10,000 making it the largest city in Alaska. The reputation was pretty rough and lawless. Even though today's population is closer to 1000 a lot of them are involved with the tourists. We saw costumed girls hanging out of hotel windows beckoning us to come up for "a visit." One of their more famous saloons, the Red Onion, had costumed bar maids, a rag-time piano player, and a few R-rated pictures from the 1890's hanging on the wall of former "employees." It's always an experience when you Live The World!