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I have a scanner again! I'm going to start sorting through some of my 35mm pictures from Alaska and see if there are any to post. I spotted this one right away and used it to test the scanner. It was early morning and everything was serene when I took this picture—it felt like we were inside a Japanese woodblock print.

I haven't digested the trip to Alaska enough to write about it yet. It was so different from any place I've been before, and I know I've only seen a fraction of the surface. Just knowing a place like Alaska exists is forcing me to think about the place I live and the way I live. I definitely want to go back to some of the specific areas we breezed through and spend more time exploring. Until I get that all figured out, pictures! (I whittled it down to 31.)





My scanner isn't working at the moment, so I'll have to wait to post some of the 35mm pics I took.

It's good to be home. And more specifically, on land. It's not natural for people to be on the ocean for an extended period of time. (Maybe I feel this way because I grew up in Nebraska, which is about as far away from an ocean as you can be.) It was a fun trip though, and I took 772 pictures. I won't post all of them. (Not all at once, anyway. ;)


Top of a totem pole in Ketchikan, AK

Leaving San Francisco

I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in Skagway, Alaska. The geography is amazing here. I heard someone paraphrasing an early explorer who said, "California has spectacular Yosemite, but Alaska is filled with Yosemites." It's true. The scale of the landscape is like being in Yosemite...everywhere.


On the ocean

My favorite part of the trip has been spending hours just watching the ocean. It's an extreme difference being out on the ocean compared with land; it's a completely flat landscape apparently without life. (Except the occasional bird, whale, or pod of dolphins...they're few and far between.) It's been a rough ride at times, and we've heard the crew mention this is the roughest ride they've had in years. It made sleeping difficult a few nights, and even though I'm on land now I can feel myself rocking. The rocking motion of the waves gets under your skin.


Approaching Juneau

We're about halfway through the trip. We saw land for the first time in two days yesterday at Juneau where we took a trip to the Mendenhall glacier. We're headed for the glaciers of the Tracy Arm tomorrow.


A canoe in front of the Mendenhall Glacier


The Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau

I'm leaving on Wednesday for 10 days and I probably won't be able to update or check email. I'll be back with lots of pictures.

"...in these coast landscapes there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all penwork seems hopelessly unavailing. Tracing shining ways through fiord and sound, past forests and waterfalls, islands and mountains and far azure headlands, it seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed."

- John Muir, Travels in Alaska

I'm thinking my trip will be like this.