Reflections of My Travel

click for pix
When we woke up this morning and got out of the car to brush our teeth, there was a large cow moose just on the other side of the small lake staring at us. Now that’s the way to wake up – surrounded by beautiful mountains and crystal blue glaciers right alongside a perfectly clear blue-green lake with a moose staring at you. It was such an exhilarating way to start the day. After sitting for a while to reflect on the beauty of the morning, we headed back to the Portage Glacier visitor center. There were some new icebergs in Portage Lake that must have calved overnight. They were just spectacular ice sculptures floating out in the clear water. The visitor’s center was really a very nice facility. They had several interactive displays, including some live ice worms that Randal tried to murder (clearly, the sign said “do not touch, your body heat will kill”) and an informational movie that we watched. Turns out that about 50 years ago, the face of Portage Glacier was directly in front of the visitor’s center. They have a huge window behind the movie screen and at the end of the movie, the screen slowly ascends to reveal this once-majestic up-close view of a glacier. Now when it lifts, there is a beautiful iceberg-filled lake and they tell you that if you look real hard, you can see the top corner of Portage Glacier above the mountain at the other side of the lake. I just find it amazing how quickly they recede. It’s truly a spectacular feat of nature to create all of that massive moving ice. We were told that there was a trail over on the Whittier side that you can hike and get a pretty close view of the glacier, but it was a 45 minute hike (which means an hour for me) and I was already feeling so crummy and weak from being sick that I asked if we could hold off and do that on the way back out of the peninsula. So instead, we started south toward Seward. When we got there, we secured a campground and bought a couple of showers to get us feeling better. Then we went out for a drive to explore the town. Driving along the edge of the bay, we spotted two orcas swimming together. We pulled over and watched them until they were out of site. It was pretty neat. We relaxed most of the day trying to get me feeling better. We made reservations with Kenai Fjords Tours for a dinner cruise tomorrow afternoon before heading back to our campground for the night.