Day 6 - Monday, June 12, 2023 - Wrangell

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Tuesday, June 13 - Juneau

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We are pulling in around 7:00 a.m. this morning cruising past snow covered peaks along the passageway. Heavily overcast but no rain. There are four other cruise ships here with 3 to 5,000 people each. The Viking ship that we are on is the smallest at about 900 people. We are anchored in the harbor and will tender back and forth to the shore. In the morning we went to the glacier gardens rainforest which is a temperate rainforest. The man who owns this has created beautiful gardens and a steep road up the mountain. One of the features is upside down trees - he has taken dead trees and stuck the base in the ground upside down with beautiful plantings on top.  We then went to the state museum which has many artifacts of the history of Alaska.  After lunch back at the ship we went back into Juneau just to wander around. Unlike many of the other Alaskan towns that were just staging points for the Gold Rush Juno actually had very large quantities of gold that were found in the early...
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Wednesday, June 21, 2034 - Denali to Anchorage

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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...
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Saturday, June 17 - Valdez

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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. 
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