Mush!

Arrived in Juneau at about 2:30 pm Sunday to be met by the Outdoorspro who had been waiting in the bar having a pint. We grabbed my bag and headed to a seedy local establishment with an ad for Jello wrestling Friday night on the door where I had my first Alaskan beer - a pint of Alaska IPA.

An hour later we were at TEMSCO Helicopters, where Mark works, putting on glacier boots and heading out onto the Mendenhall glacier for a dog sledding adventure. We flew in to find about 120 huskies waiting to pull us around a loop on the glacier as a place known as "dog camp":v
Dog camp is home to the dogs and a handful of eccentric mushers who spend their entire summer living in tents on the glacier, with a rare excursion into town. The mushers were nice but smelly. You'd be smelly too if you lived with 120 dogs. Apparantly, their smelliness doesn't dissuade the local girls who frequently and voluntarily travel to dog camp to entertain the mushers. I can only imagine their favorite position...Anyhow, my musher guide was Johnny and he has about 40 dogs of his own. This is Paco, one of his dogs that I caught sleeping on the job:
Cute. We eventually heading out for our sledding trip. Johnny led the team on a sled in front of me and pulled my sled. This was my view of Johnny and the team as we glided around the glacier:
Note that Johnny is wearing shorts. In Alaska. On a glacier. As you can see, it was a pretty nice day. I would highly recommend dog sledding if you go to Alaska. It's fun and a big part of the history and culture. But it's not cheap - the paying customers (our trip was comped by TEMSCO) said they paid $500 for the two hour extravaganza. No, it wasn't $500 of fun but I'm sure those folks went back to their cruise ships and now have something to talk about for a week or two.

Monday found Mark and I hiking up the Windfall Lake trail in the Tongass National Forest. It's a rainforest and pretty damn beautiful. This is a picture of the Herbert River with the Herbert glacier in the background:

Finally, this is a picture of a stand of trees in a marsh on the way to Windfall Lake that I thought was postcard worthy:

Glacier camping happens Thursday...