Cruisin' the Fjords

Alaska has twice as much shoreline as the rest of the US combined, which isn't hard to imagine once you realize that the whole state is a giant peninsula, touching three seas, made up of countless smaller peninsulas, riddled with islands, inlets, and coves.  I took a wildlife boat tour out of Seward and into the Kenai Fjords National Park, which in the grand scheme is a very small portion of the state, but the water we trolled all day (8am-4pm) was lined with mile upon mile of jagged coastline.  A kayaker's dream. Most of it looked like this:

 That water color is real-- almost unearthly turquoise caused by a) high levels of plankton or b) glacial sediment, depending on where you are... We saw several eagles perched atop the trees on points like this, but unfortunately I don't have a zoom lens...  More camera-friendly were the thousands of gulls and murres nesting on the cliffs; our captain nosed our boat right up to them.

I had chosen the small-group tour over the larger 100+ person deal, so there were only 11 other visitors on the boat, plus the captain and the first mate, both of whom pointed out the wildlife and bestowed local and marine knowledge on us. There was a couple from Wisconsin, one from Georgia, an older couple from Paris that reminded me of my old French friends (we talked about Toulouse for a little)... There was a cabin with booths that comfortably sat about eight of us.. and ample room to sit outside, around the edges, and in the bow.. Of course, when there were sites to see we were all out against the railing, but, it being a long day, we spent time in the cabin talking to each other, drinking tea and coffee, and eating the snacks served up by the first mate.

As we got closer to a glacier/icefield area, waterfalls started appearing on the mountainsides:

 And then chunks of ice started floating by, which indicated we were nearing the glacier:

 We stopped to eat lunch in this glacier's cool shadow.. Chunks of it calved off as we watched and made a surprisingly thunderous boom.  In this picture, we are still actually 1/4 mile away so it's bigger than it looks. 

The sky and water got dramatic on us as we headed for home:

We saw sea otters, sea lions, puffins, all the birds, and two humpback whales.  But my FAVORITE animal on the trip were these playful Dall Porpoises!!