Day 3: Tracy Arm: cold, wet and perfect. Juneau cold, and wet, but not so perfect.

This was what I was expecting from Alaska. Only better.
We woke up with the ship travelling up Tracy Arm. We sat down to breakfast, looked out the window, and saw bits of ice floating past us. Not quite the norm in Sydney Harbour.
I bolted up to the deck, camera in hand, and was absolutely gobsmacked by the absolutely stunning scenery, including my first-ever glacier. Photos don’t really capture it (just as well or we would have spent a tonne of money for nothing), but to give you a bit of an idea:

We passed one of our sister ships, which was lucky as it let me get a picture of a Princess liner without having to swim to shore. So we would have looked something like this:

We spent a few hours on deck, but Emma managed to catch a cold so we retired to our stateroom to give her a few hours sleep. Then we had our first bit of bad news for the entire trip.
On hour and a half from Juneau were were told all flights were cancelled, which meant our heli trip out onto a glacier didn’t happen.
As I put it at the time, ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! But more colourfully.
In many ways it’s probably just as well given Emma wasn’t feeling any better, and conditions are moderately appalling, but I was still disappointed.
We booked a bus trip to Mendenhall glacier as an alternative, which was our original first option, so it we still managed a bit more of the great glacier experience. The next shot gives of idea of how vile the weather was:

The pic doesn’t really give a sense of scale of how big the glacier is. The glacier is about a 1.5 km wide. The worrying bit is how fast they are receding. Two or three years ago Mendenhall receded about 300 feet in one year.
We also discovered an unidentified dropping on the footpath between the lake and the visitor’s centre. The source was a mystery, as I hadn’t noticed any Frenchmen. The mystery was solved a few minutes later when Emma looked out the window of the visitors centre and spotted a bear crossing the path we had just been walking along.
So the age old question has now been answered. A bear does *not* shit in the woods. A bear shits on the path:
(bear.swf)