June 16 2008 Seward

Jangled awake at 4:30 by our alarm, we jumped out of bed,gobbled our breakfast and headed to the station to catch our train to Seward. Well I know I sometimes get a bit carried away, but this is without doubt the most spectacular train journey I've done. The one out of Skagway that I said couldn't be surpassed? Forget it. This is the one. You start out tracking along the coast, sandwiched between the mountains and the Cook inlet and then Turnagain Arm. Here you have spectacular views of the mountains across the calm waters. Once you leave the water, you head up the Placer creek to a pass over the mountains and chug down into Seward 4 1/2 hours later. This section is stunning. There are glaciers, beautiful snow capped peaks, streams and meadows. We saw black bear and moose. One thing we found strange: there are poplar trees in full leaf growing out of a foot of snow. This is not normal! All this from the comfort of seats that we could stretch our legs out in and only just touch the seat in front of us. And we could have had breakfast on the train, allowing us to sleep for another hour!

Once in Seward we boarded a large boat and headed out into Resurrection Bay in search of wildlife and glaciers. The wildlife was plentiful. We saw puffins, bald eagles, a sea otter, black bear with cub, mountain goats, Stellar sea lions, hump backed whale and killer whales. The sea lions were easy to photograph, the others, not so easy. The Bear glacier is fed from a large ice field in the mountains. It has receded in recorded history from ending in the sea to where it is now, about 1 km back from shore. The geologists (Stevo!) among you will recognize that the sea lions are sitting on an extremely good example of pillowed basalt. There are huge thicknesses of pillow basalt exposed here, and they are text book examples. For the non-geologists, pillow basalts form when lava flows under sea water, which of course quickly cools the outside lava forming crusts that balloon into pillow shapes as they fill with lava. They then fracture and a new pillow balloons out from that. Check them out in the photo. Even for a non geologist they are awesome!

The return train trip left Seward at 5 PM. It was even better as the cloud cover had lifted, but we slept a lot as we were a bit worn out from it all. James found the way back to the RV park all by himself!