Alaska, Day 2
Resurrection Bay, from aboard the Star of the Northwest
We took a glacier/wildife cruise out of Seward on Sunday and saw pretty much everything BUT a whale, which was OK.
For five hours, we cruised around Resurrection Bay (named not for its prolific zombie population, as I told a friend, but for the the fact that a Russian captain caught in a rather turbulent storm found safe harbor in the bay on what was the Russian Orthodox Easter Sunday. There you go.
Wildlife viewed: Mountain goats, sea otters, sea lions (!!), a black bear (from very, very far away ... and that's good enough for me), eagles ... and it seems like there's something else I'm forgetting.
Anyway. The cruise also took us past several abandoned World War II outlooks that were there to sound the alarm that the Japanese were trying to enter - which they did, at least once, via submarine. It also took us past the Fox Island spit, which is now home to a "ghost forest" - in 1964, as a result of the Good Friday Earthquake, a tsunami whose proportions I can't remember washed over Seward and, of course this little spit of land sticking out from Fox Island. Sea water permeated the root system of the trees there, simultaneously killing and preserving them into the dead-but-still-standing trunks that line the spit like so many jagged teeth.
Also seen: Bear Glacier, which has formed its own lake behind a line of vegetation and has released icebergs into said lake, which looked like broken ice cubs bobbing around behind a barrier (thankfully).
We took a glacier/wildife cruise out of Seward on Sunday and saw pretty much everything BUT a whale, which was OK.
For five hours, we cruised around Resurrection Bay (named not for its prolific zombie population, as I told a friend, but for the the fact that a Russian captain caught in a rather turbulent storm found safe harbor in the bay on what was the Russian Orthodox Easter Sunday. There you go.
Wildlife viewed: Mountain goats, sea otters, sea lions (!!), a black bear (from very, very far away ... and that's good enough for me), eagles ... and it seems like there's something else I'm forgetting.
Anyway. The cruise also took us past several abandoned World War II outlooks that were there to sound the alarm that the Japanese were trying to enter - which they did, at least once, via submarine. It also took us past the Fox Island spit, which is now home to a "ghost forest" - in 1964, as a result of the Good Friday Earthquake, a tsunami whose proportions I can't remember washed over Seward and, of course this little spit of land sticking out from Fox Island. Sea water permeated the root system of the trees there, simultaneously killing and preserving them into the dead-but-still-standing trunks that line the spit like so many jagged teeth.
Also seen: Bear Glacier, which has formed its own lake behind a line of vegetation and has released icebergs into said lake, which looked like broken ice cubs bobbing around behind a barrier (thankfully).
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