Canada Alaska Holiday 2017 - Day 14 - 01 June 2017

Day 14 on the Celebrity Infinity cruise ship. A full day at Alaska's capital, Juneau. Interestingly Juneau has no external road access, but around 55 miles of road around the city. All access to the city is by air or sea. Karen and I went on a nature hike of around 6Km round trip, rising several hundred metres above Mendenhall Lake to the west side of the Mendenhall Glacier. A magnificent view across the lake to Mount Bullard and Nugget Falls, which has a sand bar below where if you look closely you'll see people dwarfed by the majestic mountains behind. On the descnet Karen and I were separated in two different groups, I stayed with the slower group to take more photos and was lucky enough to see a Porcupine in the wild. The group of around six of us sat in the forest just watching the Porcupine feeding on leaves only a few metres away - an awesome experience. Later we walked around Juneau then caught the gondola of the Mount Roberts Tramway up to Mt Roberts which gave great views of the area. Three cruise ships docked in the harbour made for a great shot down the cable as we came back down the mountain. While boarding the ship there was a commotion as a Humback Whale did a couple of feeding lunges in the 30 metres between ship and dock. I missed out on getting a shot of this which I will forever regret, but we clearly saw it do the second lunge right in front of us, it was rather exciting watching a 30 tonne monster dive through the water surface about 20 metres away! A fantastic lunch at "The Hanger", a restaurant right next to where the seaplanes dock, got to watch one taxi out and take off alongside our ship as we were leaving the restaurant. A very interesting day with some amazing scenery, animals and food in a really cool city. I think we will return there some day and stay for a while.