2023 Alaska Cruise

Another cool and damp morning but not raining at 7:40 as we left for "Doggoneit", our sled dog experience. It turned out to be quite a fun and informative experience.  It is owned and operated by Carlie and Mike Santos, raising and training sled dogs - they have an obvious passion for it.  Mike has raced in the Iditarod 3 times. We got to hold the puppies that are only about 6 weeks old - so cute! Carlie is a teacher in the cantwell school which only had 9 students in K - 12. We got to the Denali visitor center a little before noon where we ate our box lunches and had a very short visit before boarding our 12:30 train to Anchorage. The train follows rivers between the mountain ranges on both sides, passing over high gorges. Past Talkeetna it levels out with the river very wide in places. There are huge boggy areas caused by the water which can not penetrate the permafrost below. We saw two moose in these areas. The train went very slowly in some areas due to the unusually hea

A gray and drizzly morning with temperatures in the '50s. Fortunately the rain stopped and the clouds lifted enough to see the countryside but they never lifted enough to actually see Denali. We had a 4 and 1/2 hour tour that went about 40 mi into the park. It is colder here so the spruce trees are still surviving and not attacked by the spruce bark beetle.  We saw Caribou and sheep in the distance but they were mostly just little dots. On the way back we did see a grizzly bear on a patch of snow that was only a few hundred yards away which was pretty exciting. Alongside the road there were many beautiful tundra flowers. We saw a cute actic squirrel that almost scurried up to us.

I woke up at 3:00 a.m. to see a bright red orange sunrise through the window. Another beautiful morning, just a few light clouds.  A Norwegian cruise ship has just pulled in so it is pretty busy at the cruise terminal. Departing at 9:51 The bus ride to Anchorage was about 3 hours alongside steep mountains on one side and very shallow bays on the other.  We had an hour and a half for lunch and then got on another bus at 3:00 p.m. We passed through Wasilla, now famous as the former home of Sarah Palin. Most of the first hundred miles of travel was very flat with bogs stretching out long distances on both sides.  After Talkeetna, there are mountain ranges on both sides of a high plain. Almost all the spruce trees as far as you can see are dead from an invasive beetle. There was considerable road construction both from Seward to Anchorage and from Anchorage North where we had to stop and had to wait. We finally arrived at the Denali bluffs hotel around 9:30.

We arrived at Seward at the end of redemption Bay to a morning of perfectly clear skies the first time during this trip. The locals we spoke to said this is the best day of the year so far. 😊 Our first visit this morning was to the Alaska sea life center the only public aquarium in Alaska. It was fun to watch the seals sea lions and seabirds as well as touch various creatures in the touch tanks. It is a very nicely set up aquarium.  In the afternoon we went on a hike to view the Exit Glacier which is about a mile hike in from the visitor center in the national Park entrance. There are markers to show where the end of the glacier was at different years in the past 200 years. The end of the glacier was about a mile away from the viewpoint which is where the glacier extended in 2005 and the ice was about 200 ft or more deep at that point. Before dinner we were able to relax on our veranda with a bottle of champagne. We then had a nice farewell dinner with Scott and Jean in the restaurant

We sailed into Valdez harbor around 7:00 a.m. this morning under cloudy skies and temperatures in the 40s. There are mountains all about us, very spectacular. While eating breakfast we saw a seal in the harbor. It was chilly and misty when we got off the ship but it turned out to be a beautiful day with temperatures in the mid '50s. The Valdez museum was one of the nicest that we've visited with exhibits from ancient times through the Good Friday earthquake, The construction of the oil pipeline and the Valdez oil tanker disaster. 

After a very rocking and rolling evening, it is relatively calm this morning. Sunset was at 10:38pm and sunrise was at 3:56am but it was still light at 1am. It is calm because we have sailed into Disenchantment Bay with the Hubbard Glacier at the end. It is quite spectacular. After selling back out into the open ocean, the ship was really rocking and rolling. We went to an interesting lecture on the history of navigation but I had to leave a little bit early to take some Dramamine and rest in the room. We watched a number of the other recorded shipboard lectures which were quite interesting, especially the one about Jack London.