Alaska #4: Juneau

Sorry for the delay in finishing my Alaska posts!  Life has been crazy busy since we got back.  So, back to Alaska:

Our first port stop was Juneau!  We were so excited!!  My parents spent the day exploring the city of Juneau, but Kevin and I had signed up with a tour company called ABAK to go explore Mendenhall Glacier!  If you're going to Juneau, I TOTALLY recommend ABAK!!  They have a bunch of options, but the one we signed up for was a canoe trip over to the glacier, and then hiking around on the glacier!  The canoe trip was one hour each way, so that's a lot of paddling! Our arms were pretty tired by the end of the day, but it was a really beautiful way to approach a glacier!  There were 6 of us on the tour, so that was the perfect number!  It was enough people to help paddle the canoe, but a low enough company that it still felt like a personal tour. 

Mendenhall Glacier!!  

Our tour guide telling us about the glacier, and showing us where the glacier was the year prior, and years prior to that. 

 When we got to the glacier, we put on our crampons (these metal spikes that hook onto your boots) and got our helmets and harnesses on, and then we were ready to start exploring the glacier!  Our tour guide was AMAZING, and she was able to scope out some of the best areas of the glacier for us to explore, and was able to explain all of the cool formations.  We were also able to see the drastic levels of glacier melt that have been going on over recent years, and we learned that the AMAZING blue ice caves that you've probably seen pictures of before (just Google it if you haven't seen pictures - they're beautiful) have completely melted and disappeared over the past year or so.  So, no more ice caves at the Mendenhall Glacier!  It's so sad.  Seriously, watch the movie "Chasing Ice" on Netflix - it's SO informative and interesting.

Here are a bunch of pictures from when Kevin and I were hiking around on the glacier!  Any of the bright blue that you see is actually ice... Some of it kinda looks like water, and some other parts kinda look like snow, but trust me that everything is ice.  It's amazing and beautiful, and we had SO much fun!!! 

A close-up of the ice! 

Me!  It was seriously such a fun day!! 

These formations (and the big holes caused by rocks, like the one just beyond the white-ish rock) are called moulins (like Moulin Rouge), and they happen because rocks absorb heat and then cause the ice below them to melt at a more rapid pace. 

After we had thoroughly explored the glacier for a few hours, we got back in the canoe and paddled the 1 hour back to the car to take us back to the downtown area of Juneau!  Kevin and I spent a little time exploring Juneau, but we were pretty exhausted so we went back to the ship in time for dinner.   It was such a fun day!!  

Some cool artwork on the side of a building in Juneau!