Travel & Places
-
Eklutna Lake | Chugach State Park
Digging back into some Alaska posts once again. I’ve felt a little lazy in processing photos these days but I’ll see if I can make more progress on them this weekend! For now, we’re going to pick up from where we left off at Thunderbird Falls and drive around the bend to Chugach State Park and Eklutna Lake. Let’s pretend that I did not, a million times over, keep trying to call this lake Elktuna Lake. Eklutna Lake Road is a gently winding road leading into the depths of Chugach State Park. There are several other entrances to reach this expansive state park but this would be really the deepest…
-
Around Juneau, AK
Had to stop and take a photo of the Bucc-ee’s sticker all the way in Alaska! (Bucc-ee’s is a chain gas station/store in Texas that draws crowds of people when you stop at one. And super clean restrooms.) Because we’d arrived in Juneau mid-morning we had until later in the evening before our ship left port and approximately four or five hours before we had to return to the ship to get on our tour bus for the whale watching tour. Our ship was docked at the furthest dock from town and thankfully the city/cruise ships have a deal to provide shuttles to the east side of town for tourists.…
-
Mendenhall Glacier View No. 2
On our way to a whale watching tour in Juneau, we stopped for about 10 minutes at the Brotherhood Bridge near the Mendenhall River to get our first glimpse of the Mendenhall Glacier. The Mendenhall River is a relatively short river, draining Mendenhall Lake at the base of the glacier, flowing into Fritz Cove downstream. The view from the scenic overlook area was gorgeous as you can see, with swaths of fading fireweed in the foreground. In the distance we saw paddlers in the river. A trail was nearby but we had no time for sleuthing down the trail so we had to be content with our views from here.…
-
Kentucky Lady’s Slipper, Cypripedium kentuckiense | Wildflower Wednesday
I’ll have a few posts from our hiking trip along the Eagle Rock Loop from 2012 these next few weeks for Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesdays. Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesday is a much better use of “I don’t know what to post but it is Wednesday” than Wordless Wednesday used to be. Though, Wordless Wednesday had ease going for it—just post a photo! I suppose I could turn these into that as well but let’s not, though we can just keep them short and brief. I think lady slipper orchids are one of the Holy Grail orchids to find and also to keep. We had a variety/species of one when we lived in Florida and…
-
The Grotto at Westcave Preserve
I think the word has gotten out about Westcave Preserve—our tour was crowded during our visit in July. Of course it didn’t help that it was the 4th of July weekend when we visited, but still. After you’ve come here several times and basically had a tour to yourself, you get spoiled! We joined the tour and stuck towards the back of the line so Forest could walk slower and we could dawdle just a bit. And we had been here several times so we knew the main spiel already, though of course new things get sprinkled in as the years go on, particularly discussions about floods. Various flooding events…
-
Inside Passage Approach to Juneau, AK
I think this is what is labeled on a topo as Suicide Falls coming out of Cross Bay Creek on the SE side of town. Our arrival into Juneau wasn’t until mid-morning so we had plenty of time to get up, eat breakfast, and then bounce from outside deck to outside deck to take in the views as we slowly sailed into Juneau. With Admiralty Island and Douglas Island to our port side and the mainland to our starboard side, we had plenty of interesting things to see on each. The island side was less populated, less homes built and much more remote appearing. Once we crossed over to Douglas…
-
Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly, Limenitis arthemis astyanax | Wildlife Wednesday
As seems to be the general case these days, I was digging around on my backup hard drive looking for another particular photo or set of photos and came across our photos from when Chris and I joined my brother and dad to hike the Eagle Rock Loop on the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas back in 2012. You can read day 1, day 2, and day 3 here. For those entries I had put together the photos into a sort of mosaic, mostly trying to conglomerate how many photos I had per post into something more reasonable, a feat that I’ve never really been able to replicate or reduce because…
-
Mendenhall Glacier | Juneau, Alaska
When we were planning our cruise and knew that we were going to be visiting Juneau, I knew that I wanted to visit Mendenhall Glacier. And at first I thought we would just figure out a way to get there on our own. Later when booking our tours, Chris found a whale watching tour with a side stop to the glacier. It wasn’t going to be for as long as I wanted to stay at the park but it would suffice. I had vague ideas about the glacier from a former co-worker in Florida who had visited when he went to AK for a work trip. I recalled the photos…
-
Island Trail Exploration | Martin Creek Lake State Park
Let’s go back to Easter weekend this year where I left a post or two incomplete from our trip to Martin Creek Lake State Park. The promise of spring was so bright—plants were blooming, the earth smelled sweet…ahhh, only a few more months away! Annual Blue-eyed Grass, Sisyrinchium rosulatum Texas Vervain, Verbena halei Green Antelopehorns, Asclepias viridis Hercules’ Club, Zanthoxylum clava-herculis Black Snakeroot, Sanicula canadensis Lizard’s Tail, Saururus cernuus Sugar Hackberry, Celtis laevigata On the southeast portion of the park is an island that you can access by a pedestrian bridge. At the time we hiked there were portions of the trail that were a big soggy in places and…
-
Totem Heritage Center | Ketchikan, Alaska
Our brief foray into the Totem Heritage Center was enjoyable. Forest was so enthralled by some of the totems outside as we took photos with them that ran up the ramp and really wanted to go in. Chris and I both had a feeling this would not be the place for a rambunctious 5-year old. He loves going to the Houston Museum of Natural Science and even then we are bouncing from exhibit to exhibit, not really able to focus on reading any of the exhibit signs or really getting to absorb it. But he was adamant about going in and since he was free and we only had to…