Day 8 - Sep 7, 2000 Last updated: 9/8/00 9:30pm AKDT
Welcome to Seward. Another place where I can’t connect to the Internet. We checked out of the Ramada and drove for about 1 to 1 1/2 hours to Portage Glacier. For some reason, the scenery seemed prettier on the drive out of Anchorage. Maybe it seemed that way because the whole view was in front of us in the car vs. the left side view or the right side view on the train.
We stopped at the visitor’s center for Portage Glacier because we were supposed to get on the shuttle bus to Whittier for the Prince William Sound boat tour. Turns out the shuttle bus wasn’t running today. So after checking out the visitor’s center (you can no longer see the Portage Glacier from the visitor’s center because it has receded out of sight) we decided to drive through the brand new tunnel to Whittier.
The tunnel to Whittier was just completed and opened this summer. The train has had a tunnel since World War II when Whittier was built as a military base. The tunnel was widened and had “safe rooms” built into the sides of the mountain in case of an emergency. The train tracks have been embedded in a road to allow cars to drive on them. It’s a one lane road and there are strict time schedules for each direction. This summer there is no toll, but I think it will normally be $20.
There’s not much to Whittier. It is an abandoned military town that was built during WWII because the Japanese had invaded a couple of the Aleutian Islands. The military wanted an alternative rail and shipping port to Seward. About 30,000 people lived here at one time. There are now a lot of fishing vessels, a few tour boats, and not many people. Here’s our tour boat.
We went out on a 6 hour boat tour from 11:30 to 5:30. The weather was very nice (they predicted mid 50s in Anchorage before we left), except it got really windy and quite cold by the glaciers.
Here is a sequential shot of a glacier calving. It looks better on video. When I get home, maybe I’ll put together an mpeg file so you can watch a short movie.
On the boat tour we got to see a lot of wildlife. One of the easy things to see is salmon. We cruised past a hatchery. Since salmon always return to where they were born to reproduce, someone came up with the idea of taking some salmon eggs and letting them be born at the hatchery. So when the fish grow up and return home, they return to a place that makes it easy to be caught. Here’s one jumping out of the water.
We found what is called a “raft” of otters. There were too many to count.
The grand prize of today’s tour was spotting orcas, aka killer whales. Actually they are killer dolphins because they are members of the dolphin family and are not whales. They got the nickname killer whale because they sometimes kill whales.
We also saw two eagles, but I couldn’t get a picture. It was a very good trip. Lunch on the boat was quite impressive, lightly breaded halibut, pasta salad and cookie. Not your typical airline (or boat) food. After the tour, we completed our drive down to Seward, about another 2 hour drive. We stopped in Moose Pass for dinner at the Moose Pass Inn for a couple of very large, but overpriced burgers.
Road construction was weird. They ripped up the whole road, not just one lane in each direction. They stopped traffic and only let one direction go at a time over what is left of the road, mostly gravel.
We arrived at the Hotel Edgewater around 9pm, the heads hit the pillow at 9:05 and we were unconscious by 9:05:01.