The last of the inside passage - Juneau to Haines

The Mendenhall Glacier is the premier tourist must do in Juneau – and it doesn’t disappoint. Just 15 minutes’ drive from the city, it is big and white and it has little bergs floating off it. As an added bonus a beaver paddled his way around in the lake for us. We were able to walk along a woodland track to the face of the glacier then back along the sand beach. We looked up and high in a tree top was a female black bear and her two cubs. Our first wild bear sighting – so exciting - and we clicked away with our cameras. But Oh the disappointment when our best shots showed just a small back blob. Wildlife photographers we ain’t!

Up to this point our RV has been very reliable but on the way back to town it started to miss. This presented a problem as it was 3 pm and we were to sail on the ferry to Skagway early next morning. After being sent from one garage to another and phone calls to Cruise Canada, we eventually found an obliging mechanic who put the scanner on it to see what the problem was. It was a faulty spark plug/coil and they managed to find the hour required to replace it for us. Apparently if it had been a plug on a different cylinder it would have required the engine to be removed. We were lucky it was that plug, lucky to find such an obliging garage who put other work aside for us and lucky it happened in Juneau rather than on the Alaskan Highway with miles and miles between towns.

Skagway, our next port of call, is the historic “Gateway to the Klondike”. Countless fortune-seekers (and many planning to relieve them of it!) made their way here during the Alaska gold rush. They had to prepare themselves for the tortuous trip over the Chilkoot or the White Pass. The Canadian Government determined each person going to Dawson from Skagway needed 3lb of food per day for a whole year. So food alone weighed in at a half a ton and many trips up and back down were required to transport all their gear up the steep slopes. An excellent display in the Parks building gave a graphic account of life for goldminers and others who made their way to the town. A railway and a road goes over White Pass now. We drove - it was a beautiful winter wonderland at the top and impossible to imagine how after surviving the climb through the pass, anybody would have had the ability to crash through bush for another 500 miles to reach the goldfields.

Skagway has kept its old buildings and boardwalks and now relies on the stampede from thousands of cruise ship visitors who start arriving in town from the beginning of May. We attended the season kick-off party for locals and the large number of college kids from the lower 48 states who come to town to work for the season. There were lots of happy reunions, dancing and (very average) music.

Our tourist thing though was to take a flightseeing trip over Glacier Bay – 3.2 million acres of coastal islands, scenic fiords and the highest concentration of tidewater glaciers on the planet – it was spectacular. Our pilot was a character – he was very pleased to have Kiwis on board because it meant he could safely bad-mouth Donald Trump. We were pleased too as we had been keeping our mouths firmly shut for the past few weeks at the sight of Trump/Pence stickers on the back of utes!

Haines was our last ferry stop. It was a dull, overcast Sunday evening when we arrived so we free-camped along the waterfront and decided to push on towards Fairbanks the next day. It is over a thousand kilometres up the Alaskan highway and we figure that at the pace we travel it will take us about 5 days. Best we get moving!!

Mendenhall Glacier

At Mendenhall Glacier

Top of White Pass - still cold up here!

Glacier Bay

Glacier Bay

Glacier Bay

Lining up for our last ferry trip - this time on the Le Comte