Alaska: The Last Frontier (and cruise review)

We are back and safe and sound on land... but sad that we had to leave. How do you sum up our trip to Alaska?

I think the front of this shirt sums up how I feel about Alaska:

You guys, you have to go there. Alaska is one of the prettiest places I have ever seen, I think I may need to live there... except.. just in the summer time when it's not freezing out there. Anyways, enough my rambling, I have a lot to show from this trip so I can't make this post any longer than it needs to be!

Days 1 - 3: Sailing and a day in Juneau

Like I said here, we were pretty much just sailing the first day and a half. But we saw beautiful views like this:

What time do you think this picture was taken? Take a guess, I dare you.



This was 10:45... PM!!! I love it!

Ok... I'm rambling again.

Anyways, on Tuesday we made our first stop in Juneau where we went whale watching and then went to Mendenhall glacier. This was probably one of the best excursions we went on... it was so neat seeing the whales so close.

 We saw humpback whales, here they are popping their heads up, our guide says there were about 14 of them all together!

 There are some seals on that buoy... with some pretty scenery.

 Mendenhall Glacier... very pretty

And our whale friends again.

Downtown Juneau

Days 4 & 5: On Wednesday we stopped in Skagway, where we took a bus tour over the White Pass into Yukon Territory... and the bus driver was a BYU student from Utah! He was great. And the drive was really, really, really, REALLY pretty. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:

 That's a super long pipe that had some sort of historical significance that I don't remember anymore.

 I thought this place was cool, it's called Tormented Valley.. it's real Alaskan Tundra!

 Scary suspension bridge

We are larger than life.

After our bus ride, we went on a hike and float trip. 

 Rainforest.

Then we saw Sarah Palin. Sorta.

The next day we went to Glacier Bay... which was cool because you can only access that area by boat, so if you go on an Alaskan Cruise, make sure they go there!

Steven climbed the wall, what a champ!

I still have a lot of pictures to go through... so I think I'll post about the rest of our cruise later, but I'll leave you with more beautiful pictures of the sunset from the boat:

Get ready for the next post... there's still lots of great pictures!