Showing posts with label glacier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glacier. Show all posts

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Mendenhall Glacier, and departing Juneau

We did a short excursion from Juneau to the Mendenhall Glacier, only about 20 minutes outside of downtown.

It was still raining on the bus ride there, so didn't get too many good photos out the window.

But luckily the rain stopped by the time we got there.

Here we are at the glacier.












The icebergs were so blue! (that's because glacial ice absorbs all colors of the visible light spectrum except blue, which it transmits)

We didn't see any bear, but evidently they were frequent visitors to the park.


Out the window on the bus ride back to Juneau.



Douglas, the town across from Juneau.

Sunset as we departed Juneau...it was 9:00 at night.






Tailgators!

Saturday, July 5, 2014

More pics of Hubbard Glacier

Up early and caught the late end of the sunrise.

This was the glacier right next to Hubbard, not as pretty blue.


Hubbard was so unbelievably blue, with so many different hues.

The face of the glacier was so long, that we couldn't see the end of it.

The tail end of the glacier calving.

Again, the blues were amazing.

 The boat moved in closer, so we could see further up the inlet.

While this looks like a lot of people on the helipad, I was surprised it wasn't more.



 It is hard to tell how large these icebergs really are...

...until they sent a boat out to pick one up for the ice carving later.

The surrounding scenery was beautiful too!

 With every 'dark blob' in the distance, I tried to take pictures and zoom in to see if it was a seal on an iceberg. And I didn't think I caught one until I took a closer look at this photo, and that's definitely a seal on the far rock.  Questionable whether the blob in the middle is one, and that's definitely not one in the foreground.

Check out a video of the ice calving:

As the boat started heading back out the inlet, the sun came out and we had amazing views of the glacier.