Alaska - Tuesday - Portage Glacier

So, we really took a lot of pictures, and since our blog becomes our picture album at the end of each year we have to cram all the pictures in. Which means Tuesday gets split into two posts because there are just too many pictures.

Tuesday was another rainy day in Anchorage. Lucky for us, an hour drive away at the Portage Glacier it was overcast, but not rainy. It worked out great.

The views on the drive down were beautiful. The highway goes right along the coast of the Turnagain Arm, and with tall green mountains all around it's a huge contrast to our wonderful home in Tucson.

Pictures can't really capture the beauty, but we tried anyway.

When we got to Portage Lake Rachel and I went to explore the visitor's center and the shore of the lake while Jake and Annie napped in the car. The wind pushes the icebergs up to the shore by the visitor's center, and there happened to be this big iceberg sitting out there, not too far off the shore. They said that you can only see 10% of the iceberg above the waterline, which just amazes me. There's 9 times more of that ice below the water. That lake gets deep FAST. Apparently the lake itself is 650 feet deep.

Rachel looks a little like Princess Leia to me there--she had piggytail buns, and the cold wind necessitated the hood to cover them and her chilly ears.

After exploring around the visitor's center we drove up a little further to the dock where we'd be getting on our short cruise to see the glacier. We had a lovely picnic lunch and the sun even graced us with it's rays for a while.

The boat was a comfy heated boat, with a viewing deck on top. It took us around the lake to catch some of the surrounding beauty.

I took Rachel up on top to the viewing deck, but the noise and the wind and the height were a little daunting. 3 or 4 minutes were plenty for her, then we returned to the safety and warmth of the cabin below. Behind us you can see the glacier.

We returned to find Annie as happy as can be, enjoying her first cruise:

And the happy family:

I read that though you can see some of the bedrock under the glacier, most of the glacier actually extends 100 feet below the level of the lake. That boggles my mind.

I love how the ice looks blue. So pretty.