Photography, Travel

Measuring Our Wingspans, the Sky Tram, and a Glacier Flight — A Day in Juneau

The beginning of our Alaskan Adventure

With earplugs in to muffle the ambient sound, you can barely hear the whine of the plane. Without the sense of hearing, it feels like you are floating, suspended on a bubble of air, high above glacial fields and granite peaks in a buffer of quiet and solitude.

The kid who picked us up and drove us to where the seaplane was docked was also our pilot. I’m not sure if this makes me old or him very young, but he’d already been flying for a decade and he looked so youthful that I had a moment of angst about him flying our plane.

Yet, on our first full day in Juneau, Alaska, he flew us over topography which looked like a screensaver on my Apple TV and he landed us safely on a high mountain lake.

We began the day with a tram ride up to top of Mount Douglas. Once we arrived at the upper platform, we hiked through snow and ice, slipping and sliding in our newly-purchased waterproof hiking books, to reach a little viewing area with a gorgeous overlook of Juneau.

I was so focused on the view on the way up, that I failed to notice the paragliders sailing through the endless canopy of blue over Mount Douglas until I put my camera chip in the computer later that evening to download photos. What fun that must have been for them though to soar through that clear air and to be able to not only see but to feel the expansiveness of the Alaskan Sky….

We’d heard about Tracy’s King Crab Shack and we had to make a pilgrimage. My husband is from Louisiana, where crawfish shacks pop up all over the place in crawfish season. This was a little like that — except with King Crab. That’s all they serve — King Crab, served about five different ways. I was in a little bit of heaven, especially with my Louisiana boy there to take my crab out of the shell for me.

At the tram terminal, we measured our “wingspans.” It turns out that I am a Red-Shouldered Hawk and my husband is a Bald Eagle.

After lunch, we connected with a couple of women whom we had met on the ride into town and we booked our Glacier Flight on the seaplane.

Last year, we did a Base Camp landing on Denali, in Denali National Park. I expected that this experience might be a bit like that one. But, aside from cruising over the very tippy tops of those towering peaks, it was quite different.

Last year, we landed at Denali Base Camp, where the climbers take refuge. But this year, we landed, smooth as silk, on a glinting emerald high mountain lake.

I had the thought last year that I felt like I was flying over something out of J.R. Tolkien’s imagination. I could almost feel the Ents (tree people) walking beneath me. I had a bit of the same feeling during this flight.

It is so easy to lose sense of the scale of things when you are cruising at 130 mph over valleys you could never see unless you were taller than the tallest of the peaks which you could see if you were standing on the dock in Juneau.

But this, after all, is what I love the most about traveling and about photography — to lose one’s “self” in the infinite grandeur of Mother Nature.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

You might also enjoy:

Photos and Story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.