July 29

We got up and 5:30 to get to the train station in Girdwood on time only to find that a rock slide had closed the tracks until at least Saturday. We cancelled our reservation and rescheduled for Saturday as a round trip since Don does not plan to be here then to shuttle. The agent offered a coupon to make up the difference in round trip fare so we now plan to make the round trip from Girdwood to Seward Saturday. Meanwhile we went on to visit the Alyeska resort area up the canyon a short distance from Girdwood. It is a resort community much like Sun Valley, Idaho. There we visited the Alyeska Hotel and took a tram ride up about 2000 vertical feet to the top for a beautiful view of the valley below and the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet in the distance. There we saw the first of numerous glaciers we saw today. The snow on glaciers everywhere had a faint coat of brown from the ash given off by the eruption of Mount Redoubt earlier this spring. From there we visited a nearby Wildlife Conservation Center where in the course of a drive through we saw a bald eagle, elk, grizzly and black bears, a coyote, caribou, wood buffalo (darker than plains buffalo such as at Yellowstone Park), moose including three calves, musk- oxen and Sitka black tailed deer in a semi-wild habitat covering many acres. Following that we drove to Whittier and stopped at the Portage glacier on the way. Unfortunately we were unable to see much of the glacier, many mountain tops or even the terrain around Whittier and elsewhere due to low cloud cover and a constant drizzling rain. What we could see, however, was incredibly beautiful with literally hundreds of streams and waterfalls coming down from the surrounding mountains everywhere. Glaciers fed nearly all of these and we could clearly see the turquoise blue color of the ice that is characteristic of all glaciers even with the limited visibility. The interesting part of the trip to Whittier was a two and one-half mile long tunnel shared by both trains and highway traffic with a computerized traffic-control system that regulates both rail and highway traffic through the single lane tunnel. The trip takes six and one half minutes at twenty-five miles per hour. Vehicle traffic takes turns going each direction and there can be up to an hour wait to pass through the longest tunnel in North America. After returning to camp we had another wiener roast around the campfire, changed a flat tire on Don’s pickup and then played dice and card games until bedtime.