Louise Was Right

Today was a million times more spectacular than yesterday, starting from the moment we landed in Juneau this morning.

The Juneau airport is quirky and small, but Juneau is a fairly big place surrounded by huge, gorgeous mountains.

Here is the whole party gathered together: Louise and Synthia are partners for the race, and Louise's friend Jake and I will be providing support. We made plans for the race over breakfast.

And then we got to see some of Juneau. Mostly the Historic District, which is full of wonderful old buildings, jewelry and fur shops, and tourists from cruise ships.

We stopped to admire the totem pole at the city museum and then went inside to see more native art and Gold Rush artifacts.

And then we went to one of the most incredible places I have ever been. It was so breath-takingly beautiful that it seemed like a dream, but this picture proves it: I was at the Mendenhall Glacier.

The glacier is immense, but is receding at an alarming rate. In the 90s, it lost about 60 feet a year; this year, it lost 500. I'm so lucky that I got to see it before it' s gone. I didn't know that glacier ice, which is denser than regular ice is a deep, brilliant blue. The white areas on the outside of the glacier have melted a little and become less dense, but you can see the blue streaks on the glacier's edge. Those are the places where it has calved within the last 48 hours.

Its calves, little icebergs of various shapes and colors, floated around the glacial lake.

On some of them, the deep blue of the glacier ice was still visible.

The landscape around the glacier was lush with flowers, spruce and alder trees, and all sorts of mosses and lichens.

I wished David were there to take pictures of the lupines.

We hiked across some rocks to see the waterfall close up.

I wore inappropriate shoes, or as one of the other tourists called them, hiking slippers. But I survived, and so did my shoes.

It was totally worth it.

On the way back we took a shortcut through the shallow part of the lake. We had to wade through melted glacier water, but it turned out to be the safer way to go. Jake took the long way back, around the side of the mountain, and came face to face with a bear. They exchanged looks, and then the bear turned away and moved on.