These are some photos from my family's trip to Alaska in June, 2000. Okay, this was the usual commercial cruise, but we had a great time. It was my parents' 50th wedding anniversary (impressive enough in itself), and we wanted a mixture of luxurious carelessness and stunning, bracing natural scenery, and that's exactly what we got.
These are previews; click one to view the full-size image. |
People
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| My parents, in whose honor the trip took place. You'll notice they are completely surrounded by food. A great deal of eating did happen during this trip, though, so the picture isn't entirely unfair.
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Views
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| A typical Alaska view: you know, water, forest, mountain, snow, clouds, sky. I think this is somewhere near Anchorage, but it might be Seward; the truth is that this first part of the trip is rather a blur in my memory. In fact I can't remember taking this picture at all. |
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| In Glacier Bay. The specks in the water are icebergs - small, but icebergs nonetheless. The streaks coming down the mountains into the sea are tidewater glaciers (that is, glaciers that reach all the way to the water); they are making the icebergs. Just to make things more complicated, Glacier Bay was itself made by a glacier, but it's gone now, obviously. | 
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| In Glacier Bay. Close view of a tidewater glacier. Eerie, isn't it? |
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| Near Haines, looking out the Lynn Canal, which is not a canal but a very long fjord. I don't know why they call it a canal, unless perhaps it's the difficulty with spelling "fjord". We were constantly being told about the huge oscillation in the height of the tides here. The level area at the upper right is Battery Point, I believe. | 
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| Not sure exactly where this is; the important thing is the time, namely 1:30 AM in the middle of the night on the shortest night of the year, just before the solstice. We stayed up specially to see this. As you can see, the sun doesn't really set at this latitude (about 59 degrees north); it's below the horizon, but that's a mere technicality. Nothing can quite capture the dreamy, exhilarating light of this brief semi-night, but I tried to take a picture of it anyway. |
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Forests
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| Near Haines. This is the typical hemlock-and-spruce rain forest of this area, at the northernmost extent of the great coastal rainforest that runs up from Washington State. |
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| Orca Beach, near Ketchikan. Considerably further south than Haines, and you get a completely different sort of rainforest, dominated by cedar. In this picture things look dead, and of course a lot of stuff is, but even things that are dead aren't dead because other things immediately grow all over them, as other pictures will show. | 
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Foliage
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| Near Haines. The famous Alaska dogwood, a low plant rather like a trillium. |
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| Near Haines. Shelf mushrooms on a dead tree. It is said that they drop their spores to the ground, and that if the tree falls over they will twist 90 degrees so that their bottom still points towards the ground (so they can still drop their spores). | 
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| Near Haines. Wildflowers growing amid the ruins of something or other. The wildflowers are said to have a very short blooming period, but we were lucky enough to be there right in the middle of it, the week containing the longest days of the year (which in Alaska are really long). |
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| Near Haines. More wildflowers. They look happy. | 
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| Orca Beach, near Ketchikan. I have no idea what this stuff is. Someone could write a whole dissertation on the mosses, lichens, and small ferny things that grow all over the forest floor, the trees living and dead, and just about anything that holds still for longer than five minutes in this forest. In fact, someone probably has. |
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| Orca Beach, near Ketchikan. A mushroom living in a dream world of mosses. | 
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| Orca Beach, near Ketchikan. I really have no idea what this stuff is. |
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Rocks
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| Orca Beach, near Ketchikan. These rocks are pounded and sprayed by the sea, but they are full of life all the same. The rainforest margin appears behind them. |
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| Orca Beach, near Ketchikan. A sort of cascade of foliage spilling from the rainforest margin over a natural rock wall. The stuff on the right appears to be some sort of fern or bracken. The stuff on the left with the dangly flowers has a name which someone told me, but I promptly forgot it. Hey, I'm supposed to be a photographer and a botanist?? | 
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