We took a cruise from Vancouver, British Columbia to Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, in the fall of 2016. Along the way, we went whale watching and saw a pod of humpbacks "bubble net feeding" - where one humpback will trap and concentrate fish with bubble streams from its blowhole while other whales explode from the sea with mouths yawning wide to scoop up the bounty. There were nearly a dozen whales surfacing/feeding at once.
I have seen and hiked to several mountain based glaciers before, but was amazed at the size of the glaciers in Alaska. We were viewing one of these glaciers from the deck of the cruise ship, when a chunk of ice broke off at the terminus of the glacier. These ice breaks (called calving) occur because the forward motion of a glacier makes the terminus (the end of the glacier touching the eater) unstable. These resulting chunks of ice are icebergs. This particular calving incident created a wave that we not only saw, but felt on board the ship.
We also had the opportunity to walk on a few trails and witness several bears on the opposite shore foraging for food. We witnessed a large grizzly standing up obviously sensing (smelling) another bear. A few minutes later a second grizzly was spotted hurrying away from the larger bear.
I then joined a group of photographers for a week photographing in Denali National Park and Preserve. We journeyed 90+ miles into the heart of the park via an "old" school bus. Each day started early for sunrises and ended late photographing sunsets. In between we photographed a cloudless Mt. Denali. Our guide shared with us that visitors of Denali National Park can be broken up into two groups: the 30% club and everyone else. The 30% club is made up of the people who were fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. Every day we had clear skies and saw all of Mt. Denali. Also, for a couple of evenings we were able to see and photograph the Aurora Borealis or "northern lights".
Between the sunrise and sunsets, we travelled up and down the only road in Denali to photograph the animals that call the park their home.
