Alaska Cruise Day 5

Thursday, August 3, 2006

Today was likely the highlight of our trip. We arrived in Juneau at 8:00AM, and Mike and I got our walk-up call at 9. We eventually staggered out of bed, got ready, had breakfast (waffles, yum), and made our way off the boat.

The weather looked rather forbidding. It was cold and rainy with low cloud cover. At 11:20, we found the lady to get us started on (JU10A) the extended helicopter and glacier trek. It was to be a tour of a helicopter ride to and from Mendenhall glacier, along with four hours of hiking around on it. The lady told us she needed to gather up the other participants and then she would check to see if it was on or cancelled due to weather. I was determined to not be too disappointed if it was cancelled as I would rather that than fly in scary weather. She took our tickets and recorded our weights.

Eventually, we heard her call the shop on her cell and we were delighted to hear a surprised “Oh, really?!” Within a minute or two, we were on a van out to the airfield. We got to the place and as soon as we walked in, it was an assembly line. The lady at the dock must have phoned in our weights as they had all our gear laid out and labeled with our names.

The provided everything: pants, jackets, polar fleece (if we wanted), boots, leg coverings, gloves, and harnesses. They also gave us backpacks containing a bagel, salmon-flavored cream cheese, an energy bar, and a bottle of water. There was another bag labeled with our names into which we shoved personal things that weren’t coming with us (the boots and sweaters, etc we had just taken off in exchange for theirs).

We signed the standard waivers, and soon we were headed out to the waiting helicopter. Six tourists to one helicopter and we were assigned seats based on our weights. Mike got the window behind the pilot and I was next to him.

The helicopter ride was the part that had me most nervous. It’s hard to forget there’s just a rotor holding you up and should the engine fail, you’ll fall like a rock, but eventually I told myself that worry accomplished nothing, so if I’m going to die, I should at least be enjoying myself when it happened, so I did. The rest of the helicopter ride was a blast. The pilot took us on a little tour around, going into nugget valley and showing us nugget glacier and a big waterfall. It was amazing.

Eventually, though, we made our way to Mendenhall Glacier and landed. Someone met us at the door to the helicopter and motioned us out and over to the “base camp,” a large yellow tent that we never got to go into.

Here, we hit another assembly line where they gave us ice picks and strapped crampons on our feet. Then, we were on our way. We would go a short distance, and then our two guides, Dave and Dawn, would stop and give us a lesson in something. We learned how to go uphill (dig toes in, take small steps, use ice pick in front of you), downhill (stomp feet down like having a childhood temper tantrum and keep ice pick behind you), and sideways (keep ice pick uphill from you and crab walk). The general rule seemed to be that unless you are going uphill, keep as many crampons in the snow as possible. The group, (of 11 tourist and two guides) would get periodically spread out and then they would stop us to talk about things until everyone caught up.

It seemed that everyone was pretty fit and there were no obvious laggards, although one fellow who was extremely tall seemed to have a harder time than others overall. Maybe this is one case where being lower to the ground is helpful as it really seemed fairly easy to me.

At one point, they told us we could walk into an ice cave in groups of one or two to look around. It was a narrow enough crevasse that people wouldn’t be able to pass each other. Eventually, Mike and I went and it was very narrow, but sooo cool. I bent my head around the corner and saw water falling from the ceiling and the whole inside was that beautiful blue color. Still, the water had to go someplace and we were standing in the river it was forming and I guess some of it topped over the edge of my right boot and my foot was rapidly wet and cold. The guides told me not to sweat it, that it would warm up soon and they were right. After five minutes or so, once we got moving, I never thought about it again until the end when we took off all our gear (ewww).

The rest of the four hours that we actually spent on the glacier was maneuvering through crevassases and over ridges. They took us on a route they had never done before as they wanted to scout it out and no one in the group had any objections.

At one point, a fellow from (I think) Costa Rica, was holding up his camera and saying “photo, photo.” I guess he was trying to get a group picture. He stepped sideways and stumbled into a stream. While I was horrified at the moment, I didn’t fail to notice that while he let his body go into fridged water, he did all he could to hold that expensive camera out to the side to keep it from getting wet. He didn’t entirely succeeded, but after we (the guide and I) pulled him out of the water and he dried off his camera, it still took pictures. He showed no concern for himself at all, just the camera. In the end, we all gave our cameras to Dave and had him take a few group shots.
While the whole trip was amazing, there were two highlights that just blow my mind. At one point, to get over a vertical drop, we clipped onto a “zip-line” of sorts. We don’t let go and coast though, rather, we lean back with our weight on the rope and walk somewhat horizontal to the ground, putting our crampons flat into the vertical wall while descending sideways.

The other highlight was that they let us try out ice climbing. They ran down two ropes and each guide acted as a belayer for a rope while we went up one by one. In each hand we had an ice pick and our harnesses were attached to one end of the rope. We were told to swing the pick as high as we could over our heads and use our legs to climb up to it. We were to stick our butts out and look down at our feet, concentrating on jamming the toe picks into the ice and keeping our feet level.
Mike went first and had no problems at all. Some of the others of our group can’t say the same thing. Two of the women in particular only went half way up and then wanted to come down. Just before I went up, I watched a fellow who really looked like he had done this before and I took cues from him. Particularly swinging my arms independently instead of putting them both at the same height like some were doing. It seemed like only seconds until I was at the top of a several story tall climb and sitting back in my harness, I was lowered down. At the bottom, Dawn asked me if I had ever done that before. I replied no, and she told me that it looked like I had. Neat, I didn’t look clueless! Bonus! Still, I wish I could have gone again, as does Mike. Heck, we were both about twice as fast as some of the others, shouldn’t we get to go again?

In all too short a time, we were back at the helicopter where they took our ice picks and crampons and had us board. We waved to Dawn and Dave as the helicopter took off and soon they were gone. The ride back was over in about five minutes. I guess we got the scenic route going out to the glacier, and now they were in a bit more of a hurry.

Sure enough, there was another group waiting to leave when we arrived. We were told that ours was the first group of the day that got to go. All the ones scheduled before ours were cancelled due to the weather. For us, though, the weather was great. The clouds lifted and all was well. I can’t believe our good fortune yet again. This was one of the more amazing experiences of my life. I will never forget it.

After all this, we were driven back to the boat where we boarded and dropped things off and then headed back out to the town. The first few blocks of Juneau are a little depressing as they are so obviously made for tourists, but go up a hill, and you are at a more real-looking place. We even found a place that we gather was Juneau’s “Down to Earth” where I found my Ginger Snap cookies that I like so much.

After wandering around a while, we got hungry, so we went back to the boat and headed over to the sushi bar where they actually had all the good kine sushi along with wasabi, shoyu, and ginger. Yum. After quite a bit of that, we got a small pizza and took it up to our room where we opened our second bottle of clandestine smuggled wine. We ate it on the balcony as the ship left port.

Tomorrow is Ketchikan. We don’t arrive until 2, so Mike and I are planning on sleeping in.