Magnificent Monday–Alaska Photos!

Hi everyone!

Ally here while Shellie is away with her family for a bit. I thought this might be as good a time as any to finally share with everyone a few of the pictures that I took on my recent cruise to Alaska.

Now, a few years ago I was on tour and realized I didn’t have a good answer for when people would ask if I had any hobbies. For a long time, writing was my hobby. But now that my hobby is my job, I wanted to find some new creative outlet that was just for fun.

That’s when I bought a “real” camera (I have a Canon DSLR T3i) and a few lenses (most of these photos were taken with my Canon 15-85) and started playing around with photography. I even took a class last spring.

By no means am I a pro!! But it was a lot of fun playing around with my camera in Alaska, and since there very few places on earth more beautiful, I lucked into some pretty good shots that I thought all of you might like to see.

Now…the cruise!

We had a couple of days at sea at which time we saw A LOT of whales!

 

Our first big “stop” on the cruise was Tracy Arm, an amazing fjord that was carved out by glaciers thousands of years ago.

 

A massive glacier marks the end of Tracy Arm. Here’s a shot of Tracy Arm, with the glacier just visible in the distance.

When we finally reached the glacier… Wow.

While we were at the glacier it actually calved (what they call it when a piece of ice falls off of the glacier). When that happens, the new ice that is revealed is the most beautiful blue color that I have ever seen. It was spectacular.

 

 

And, speaking of calving, see those little black specks on the ice? Well, those are seals–hundreds of seals–that gather near the glacier to calve. Here’s a closer shot of them.

 

Considering these are fully grown seals and they look tiny in comparison to the glacier, I think this gives you a pretty good idea of the scale.

Fun fact: seals like to calve near glaciers because whales–the natural predator of seals–won’t come near the glaciers, many suspect because whales don’t like glacier silt, or the sandy-type residue that is from when the glaciers moved across the earth, basically acting like sandpaper, grinding down mountains.

The other glacier that we visited was the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau.

 

This is known as America’s only “drive up” glacier, and it’s definitely worth the trip. There was a really nice visitor’s center, but the real treat comes by walking about a mile down a trail to this waterfall and, basically, beach made of glacier silt. You can see the glacier itself to the left in the photo above.

We were really lucky that we were the only ones there for a long time. You can see my niece building a sandcastle out of glacier silt. That’s not something you can do every day!

This is Emerald Lake in the Yukon Territory. I believe it gets this distinctive color because it was all glacier ice at one point, and as you have seen, there’s nothing prettier than glacier ice!

While we were in the Yukon Territory we visited a place owned by a woman who participates in the Iditarod dog race every year.

These dogs are amazing animals, and needless to say my nieces’ favorite part was meeting all the new puppies. “Clyde”, pictured above, was their favorite. (I was fond of his litter mate, “Bonnie”.)

One of the ports we visited was Ketchikan. It’s the rainiest city in America, getting an average of 160 inches of rain a year!

 

Of course, it rained when we were there, but that didn’t stop us from going out on one of the real ships from the TV show DEADLIEST CATCH. We listened to a bunch of real arctic crab fishermen tell us stories about that incredibly dangerous profession. I will never look at a crabcake the same way again.

Most of all, it was a lot of fun!

And that’s it, gang.

I wish you all could have been there with me!

-Ally