Juneau

The day after Glacier Bay our ship stopped at Juneau.  The town itself was very disappointing, a ‘made for cruise-ship’ town it was just tourist shops, very different from our last cruise.  Anyway, we didn’t come here for the town, we came here to hike the West Glacier Trail.  After talking to the information centre, we were told that the West Glacier trail was still mostly snow and ice, and that it wouldn’t be safe for us to do that until there was a lot more melt.  So we settled on doing the Mt Roberts trail, which turned out to be fantastic.  We were surprised, though, when the trail turned to snow and then soon we were in a forest with no track, only heavy snow which we were sometimes sinking up to our thighs with each step.  We were really grateful that another couple from Alabama were walking the trail as well, so once there was no trail we stuck together, thinking that at least in the worst case scenario we could just go back down to the start and not complete the trail.  After around half an hour of walking in the snow a local guy speedily passed us, we laughed and said to him that he’d obviously walked in snow before as we were all sliding around and each 100m sometimes was taking minutes just because we couldn’t get footing.  It turned out to be very lucky that the local passed us, as then we could follow his footprints, and all 4 of us are pretty sure we wouldn’t have found the top if it wasn’t for that.  Anyway about an hour later we reached the top, and were instantly pleased that we’d chosen this trail for two reasons; it is the top of the Mt Roberts Tramway, which meant that we could both get the chairlift back down the mountain, and also that there was food and drink at the top.  Many drinks later we jumped on the tramway and returned to our ship.  Our photos are here.

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