ALASKA! BEAR WATCHING AT THE ANAN WILDLIFE OBSERVATORY

Our cruise ship docked at Ketchikan, our final Alaskan port and our last chance for another Alaskan Adventure. Of course, Bob couldn't just ride on a scenic train or take a tour of some ordinary place, not when there were more BEARS to be seen! And so we boarded a tiny four-seater float plane:

Up, up and away!

ALASKA! GRIZZLY BEAR WATCHING ON CHICHAGOF ISLAND AND A CRAB LEG FEAST IN JUNEAU

Because of bad weather, we had missed a planned trip to fly out of Homer to Katmai National Park to do some grizzly bear watching. A few days later when our ship docked in Juneau, we booked two seats on a similar trip Princess Cruises offered to Chichagof Island.

The cruise people drove us to Bear Creek Outfitters, where we were fitted with stylish rubber boots and loaded on a float plane--a first for us.

Our Bobcat plane had six seats. We were joined by a second plane, also carrying six people.

We were in the air for about half an hour, and the scenery from our eagle's eye viewpoint could have been footage for a Hollywood movie:

YUKON TERRITORY

When we weighed all the options in Skagway provided by our cruiseline, nothing really grabbed us, so we decided to do our own thing. We rented a car and drove 125 miles north into the Yukon Territory. On the map below, the star is our starting point, and our destination, marked by the arrow, is Whitehorse, the capital of and only sizable city in the 186,272 square miles of the Territory. 

The Yukon is the smallest of Canada's three northern territories and fourth Canadian province or territory we have visited. We had previously traveled to British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. Only nine more provinces/territories to go! (I don't know if we'll ever get to Nunavut. Who visits Nunavut? I haven't ever heard of it.)

We went through a border crossing, but we didn't even have to get out of our car:

The landscapes were stunning and everything you would expect in this wild, undeveloped place. The entire territory only has about 37,000 people, which means if they were equally distributed, there would be five square miles per person.

The roads were mostly wide and straight and very well-maintained, which made the miles fly by:

Of particular note is Emerald Lake, obviously named for its stunning jewel-toned waters:

ALASKA! SKAGWAY AND THE GOLD RUSH CEMETERY

Our next cruise destination was the booming metropolis of Skagway, population 1,000 in the winter, which grows to 2,000 in the summer to serve the 900,000 tourists who come through town.

The rocky hill across from the dock is covered with all kinds of interesting graffiti:

Some of it looks like ads for local enterprises:

ALASKA! GLACIER BAY

Well, it didn't take us long to get into the cruise life as our Princess ship glided smoothly through Alaska's icy waters. We had been on the go for over a week, and a little bit of R & R was definitely welcome:

Our next destination was the coastline of Glacier Bay National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that encompasses 5,130 square miles or 3.3 million acres on Alaska's southern panhandle. It's a little hard to see in the map below, but our cruise starting point at Whittier is the red oval on the left and Glacier Bay is the center oval:

I think we saw about 1/10% of the park, but it was a spectacular 1/10%.  No roads lead to Glacier Bay, so the only options are to get there by air or by sea. Most visitors see the bay by cruise ship (400,000 visitors/year), but the number of ships per day is limited, which made our viewing experience very nice.

There are fifteen tidewater glaciers in the park, and while we didn't see them all, we did see quite a few. One nice thing about this day at sea is that we had a park ranger on board talking on the ship intercom most of the day. I would never have guessed there was so much to say about glaciers. Honestly, this was our third trip to visit glaciers, and though every single one was gasp-worthy, they were all beginning to look alike to me. That is not to say that it wasn't a fantastic day of glacier viewing, because it was, but a second day of being on the ship all day was causing Cruise Ennui to set in.

And that is my excuse for not having taken better notes as our excellent park ranger spoke.

ALASKA! FROM ANCHORAGE TO WHITTIER AND A CRUISE SHIP TRIP TO THE HUBBARD GLACIER

Our first week of wandering on our own all over Alaska had come to an end, and it was time to get on the cruise ship. (We wholeheartedly recommend our itinerary of self-directed travel + cruise.)  

We had to drive from Seward all the way back to Anchorage to drop off our car at the Anchorage airport, a distance of about 125 miles, but there really was no other option. Dropping off the car where we were getting on the cruise ship would have been horribly expensive. 

We met the Princess Cruise people at the airport, and they put us on a bus with others from our cruise and sent us to Whittier, the cruise port located about 60 miles away but which we had pretty much driven by on our way to Anchorage to return the car. Oh well. Driving anywhere in Alaska is a visual feast, and we enjoy being in the car together.

Our bus drove southeast along the scenic Turnagain Arm of the Gulf of Alaska:

SEWARD, ALASKA: KENAI FJORDS NATIONAL PARK

After spending a couple of days in Homer, we headed north, then east, then south towards Seward, a distance of about 170 miles

Traveling in Alaska in any way but on a cruise ship requires stamina. Distances are long, but the sights are worth the journey.

Seward is a cute little town of only 2,500 people. It was named after William Seward, U.S. Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, who is famous for orchestrating "Seward's Folly," the best land purchase the U.S. ever made other than the Louisiana Purchase. It was William Seward who negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, adding over a half million square miles to the United States. The price was $7.2 million, or about two cents an acre. (The Louisiana Purchase was almost three cents per acre 64 years earlier.)

Seward is a fun little town and, like so many of its Alaskan counterparts, if full of quirky "art," some of which once again reflects Alaskans' bizarre passion for ice cream:

The flowers all over Alaska were stunning. With such a short growing season, how do they manage this?

We had booked an 8.5-hour Kenai Fjords Cruise leaving out of Seward at 9:00 AM, so we made our way to the docks . . . 

. . . and boarded the Melissa Ann, a boat for 150 people. Luckily, there were just 34 passengers and 3 crew aboard:

 

HOMER, ALASKA: GULL ISLAND

We had scheduled a trip with Alaska Bear Adventures in Homer to fly to Katmai National Park or Lake Clark National Park to experience what is supposed to be the best grizzly bear viewing in Alaska.  However, much to our dismay, the trip was canceled due to a forecast of heavy rain.

We had a day to kill in Homer, and, still looking for adventure, we discovered that we could book a private harbor cruise of Kachemak Bay. In spite of the weather, or maybe even because of it, the scenery was beautiful:

Our goal was Gull Island, a rocky crag about three miles out that offers prime nesting spots for seabirds:

HOMER, ALASKA

After breaking up a long drive from Talkeetna to Homer by spending time at a musk ox farm and a reindeer farm near Palmer and then staying overnight in Anchorage, we continued our long drive down the Kenai Peninsula. The distance from Talkeetna to Anchorage is about 115 miles, and the distance from Anchorage to Homer is about 220 miles. In a place like Alaska, where there are an infinite number of side trips and sights, that could be a week-long trip, but we managed it in two days.

One of Homer's nicknames is "The End of the Road." You can see why:

The white line is Day One, and the blue line is Day Two.

The Kenai Peninsula is located on the southern coast of Alaska and is famous for its beautiful scenery. Homer, our next destination, is marked by the red dot on the map below:

Bob had read that the salmon might be running in some of the rivers and that there were some good places for animal sightings, so we made several stops along the way. Try as we might, we didn't see any moose, or any other large animals for that matter:

Here and there we saw a salmon swimming upstream, but not the hordes we had hoped for. I think it was just a bit too early in the season:

ALASKA! A MUSK OX FARM AND A REINDEER RANCH

My husband is a wildlife lover extraordinaire, and Alaska is certainly the place to see wildlife, but he wasn't content with seeing animals in the wild. No, he had to scout out every specialty farm and preserve. I was a little bit worried about OD-ing on animals on this trip, but for the most part, what we saw was unique and entertaining, starting with a musk ox farm and a reindeer ranch.

The Musk Ox Farm is in the Palmer/Wasilla area, about 45 minutes from Anchorage.

The farm is a non-profit organization that is funded partly by tourist dollars and partly by selling muskox wool, called qiviut. Qiviut is eight times warmer than sheep's wool by weight and softer than cashmere, but boy-oh-boy is it expensive.  A single skein (1 oz./200 yards) sells for $95.00. 

A male musk ox sheds 4-7 pounds of qiviut per season. I suppose if I had to brush one of these beasts, I'd charge $95.00/skein too.

For a more reasonable price of $11.00 each, we took a 45 minute tour of the farm, which has about 80 musk oxen, the largest captive herd in the world.

The musk ox is one of the oldest living species and was once a contemporary of the woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger. The goal of the farm is to domesticate these animals. It takes multiple generations to build a domesticated herd, and they've been at it since the 1950s.