Alaska #3: Hubbard Glacier

The first day of our cruise we were just cruising at sea all day (no ports), but they did take the ship over to Hubbard Glacier!  We got really close to the glacier (less than 1/2 mile away), and they spent a lot of time there so all of the passengers could really enjoy the scenery. Also, the glacier was doing a TON of calving while we were there!  It was SO loud, and huge chunks of the glacier were breaking off.  You could definitely see it happen long before you could hear it.  We took a ton of pictures, so I'll post them below.  Other than Hubbard Glacier, we just spent the day resting, getting settled in our rooms, and hanging out with each other!  It was a great way to spend the first day of the cruise!! 

Here's a close-up view of the water by our ship when we were pretty close to the glacier!  So many chunks of ice! 

On a related note, if you want to see an AMAZING documentary on glaciers, you should watch "Chasing Ice" on Netflix.  It's seriously so well done, and you get to see lots of amazing glaciers and learn about them, and you also get to see (and hear) a lot of glacier calving!  A few Alaska glaciers are featured in the documentary too (including Mendenhall Glacier, which is in Juneau, which will be Alaska post #4!). 

Alaska: Seward and Kenai Fjords National Park

After we left Denali National Park, we drove to Seward!  It was about a 6 hour drive, and it was BEAUTIFUL!!  The last few hours of the drive are all along the coast, and it's spectacular. We arrived in Seward around 6pm and met up with my parents!  I hadn't seen my parents since Christmas!!  It was so awesome that we were all going to get to hang out on the cruise together and see Alaska.  They had already checked-in at the hotel, so we checked-in and then we had to drop-off our rental car.  Then we all went out to dinner at Seward Brewery and spent the evening hanging out!  We also saw the sea otter that likes to hang out in Seward Harbor!

Here's a cute little sea otter bench!!  I thought it was adorable. 

The next morning we had breakfast, walked around the adorable little town of Seward, and then we boarded our tour boat to see Kenai Fjords National Park!!  It was a 6 hour tour that was led by a Park Ranger, and it was really amazing.  It was a fairly small boat and the waters were pretty choppy for parts of it, so I was definitely pretty seasick for portions of it.  I made sure to be outside in the freezing cold for as much of it as I could handle, because the views were amazing and the cold fresh air really helped me feel better!  On our tour we saw humpback whales, orcas, dolphins, mountain goats, puffins (I love puffins!!!!!!!!!), sea otters, and Steller sea lions. It was AMAZING. 

Our tour boat!  The Spirit of Adventure (just like in Up!!)

Mom and Dad boarding the tour boat!

Me and Kevin on the tour boat! 

This looks like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean or something, but it's Alaska! 

Kevin!!  He looks a little chilly :) 

Me and my pops!! 

An amazing glacier!!  And there's another tour boat for scale.  

 We were back from the Kenai Fjords National Park tour by about 5:30pm, and then we had to board the cruise ship by 6:30pm!  It ended up being the perfect amount of time.  I'll post more this week about our cruise around Alaska!!  We saw Hubbard Glacier, Juneau (Mendenhall Glacier), Skagway, Icy Strait Point, and then Ketchikan! 

Alaska: Denali National Park

Our trip started off REALLY rocky thanks to some crazy weather in Chicago that delayed our flight from Philly for about 4.5 hours... Which meant that we missed our connection flight to Anchorage.  It was a HUGE mess for about 24 hours and super stressful/exhausting, but we ended up FINALLY making it to Anchorage about 28 hours later than we were expecting (and I won't bore you with all the details, but I'll just say that United Airlines really sucks and I don't ever want to fly with them again, and Alaska Airlines has amazing customer service and I love them).  But, thanks to that huge flight mess, we missed our train from Anchorage to Denali National Park, and if we waited for the next available bus/train then we'd have to miss Denali altogether.  So... that meant we started hunting around for other options, and we determined that we could rent a car in Anchorage as soon as we landed, and then we could drive to a hotel on the outskirts of Anchorage (in the direction of Denali, to make the trip shorter the next day... but we badly needed some sleep first).  If we got an early start the next morning, by the time we drove to Denali the next day we could still have about 8 hours to try to see as much of the National Park as we could.  So, that's what we did!!  And my goodness we had an amazing 8 hours in Denali.  We were SO excited that we were still going to get to see it, because for a little while at the airport it was looking like we might even miss our cruise!

This was our drive from our Anchorage hotel to Denali!  So dang pretty the whole way.  We were exhausted but soooo incredibly happy and excited. 

Kevin at the beginning of our big hike in Denali!  Parts of it were SO snowy, and other parts were so muddy!  Made for a challenging hike!! 

Amazing views from the hike! 

 

Ok you guys, this is moose poop.  And it was ALL OVER the trail!  We must have seen about 50 piles of moose poop throughout the whole hike.  We were keeping a close eye out for moose, because apparently they are VERY active around there and they will charge you if you get too close.

When we finally reached the viewpoint at the top of the mountain, this was the view!!  We spent about 20 minutes just sitting up there enjoying some water and a snack and the AMAZING views!!  Plus, we were all alone!!  There was no one else up there for the full 20 minutes or so we were there.  It was so awesome.  Here's some more pics from the viewpoint: 

 After we got back down the mountain (in total it was about 4 hours), we went for a drive into the park!  Usually cars are only allowed to go about 15 miles into the park (in order to protect the wildlife), but because it was so early in the season the rangers said we were able to drive about 30 miles into the park!  That evening we saw a bunch of caribou and about a million rabbits.  We also saw this sign which was kinda funny:

Here are some caribou!!  I hope you can see them ok (I just took this pic with my phone).  I think there are 6 caribou in this picture

There's a bunny rabbit!!  They were all soooo fluffy.  We seriously saw like a million rabbits.

After the drive we headed to the hotel!  We were soooo exhausted. We had a really lovely dinner 

And our much-deserved beers after the exciting adventures we'd already had on our trip!  

We went to bed pretty early, because we both decided that we'd like to wake up really early to drive into the park one more time to try to see some wildlife before we had to hit the road!  We were driving to Seward that day, so we wanted to make sure we made it there at a good time.  Here's some pics from the early morning drive into Denali!  We saw a LOT more wildlife that morning!  We saw one fox, 4 moose, and we even saw a grizzly bear!! It was crazy awesome. 

 

A bear!!!  

It stood up to check us out. 

This is with the amazing zoom feature on Kevin's camera! 

A moose!!  They are so much bigger in person than I'd even imagined.  They're seriously AMAZING creatures.  I love them. 

I got to watch this one run down a snowy hill!  They can run super fast. 

 That was Denali National Park!!!  We loved it so much, and we absolutely want to go back.  It's just so amazing, and pictures really can't do it justice.  I've heard it gets really busy in the summer months, so when we go back I'll want to go in mid-May again before the crowds show up.  It was so peaceful and it still felt so wild.   Our next stop on our trip was Seward!  I'll be working on these Alaska posts all week, but I'll try to finish the Seward post tonight or tomorrow!!