Juneau and the Glaciers

Ok So we are slowly catching up on everything. The next lot of photos comes from Juneau. Its the capital of Alaska, but it too is only accessable by boat and plane. The population is about 30,000.
Unfortunatley the weather was really bad the day we were there.

We did a city tour and went out to the Mendenhall Glacier, it was quite spectacular.
This is the ice that has melted and broken off


For any one that doesn't know, a glacier is a frozen river. They are thousands of years old and flow really slow, like a couple of metres per year.

The water is the purest in the world because it was frozen before there was any pollution. There are also huge valleys left behind once the ice melts, this is how the inside passage in alaska was formed.

In the afternoon we went to a salmon hatchery. Fish farms are illegal in alaska, but to keep stocks up they hatch the salmon here and relase them into the wild. They even have a fake freshwater river for them to swim into and spawn. They also had the best collection of native alaskan fish. it was like a tropical tank!


They also had this critter.
In the afternoon we sailed down Tracey's arm and to the Sawyer Glacier. Sawyer is melting into saltwater so its melting even quicker, but it was cool to see ice in the ocean, unfortunatly we couldn't get too close because of the ice.

Tracey's arm was formed by sawyer glacier carving it out of the ice, now that its melted and filled with water you can sail down there, but its a tight squeeze.




But the Glaceier was amazing!




We couldn't stop taking photos, it was awesome.