Alaska - Day 9

It was a dry, partly sunny day for our drive down the Seward Highway, a National Scenic Byway ranked as one of the top drives in the United States. There were steep mountains on one side of the road with the water of Turnagain Arm on the other and then mountains beyond the water. The views were indescribable. We stopped at Girdwood, Alaska, home of the Alyeska Ski Resort. A family has run a jade shop there for 40 years, so in addition to a wonderful selection of gifts, they have almost a museum of native artifacts including a huge baleen basket with ivory handle. On the back wall of their shop and also in a courtyard of the nearby Bake
Shop, there were huge hanging baskets of tuberous begonias. We discovered that some of them are many years old, kept during the winter at an Anchorage greenhouse for $70/pot.

In order to get to Whittier, we had to go through a narrow tunnel with both railroad tracks and driving surface. Traffic is only one way so vehicles (and the train) must be on time. Despite the gathering clouds that had us concerned, Whittier had "the nicest day of the whole summer." It was sunny and beautiful.

The scenery on our boat cruise into Prince William Sound was too grand to capture in words. Mountains, forests, dozens and dozens of waterfalls, sometimes seven glaciers at once, plus sea lions, sea otters and harbor seals. The glaciers calved, the waterfalls roared and the icebergs
crackled like Rice Krispies. In addition to the scenery, we enjoyed a great salmon and prime rib buffet on the way out with a dessert buffet on the way back to town. A kittiwake rookery (lots of babies in the nests) and two bald eagles ended our last full day of sightseeing in Alaska.
Laurel Johnson - Tour Director