Chapter 15: Fly to Kansas City from Juneau
Long journey
We took a group photo at the end of day one but the light was bad. Here it is: Andrew, Josh, RipTide, Mark, Paul, Nancy, Peter, Thuha, Ann, Maria, Grayson.
We decided to take a second photo at the end of day four in better light. Here it is: Maria, Grayson, Thuha, Josh, Ann, Andrew, Flip, RipTide, Ralph, Mark, Nancy, Peter. If you look very closely, you can see a bit of my left leg on the far left hand side of this picture. I got cropped (I am pretty sure it was nothing personal).
So, this is me, for the record.
Overnight, a too-large accumulation of melting water broke through an ice dam at "Suicide Basin" and flooded the downstream Mendenhall River. I don't have a before shot but here is what it looked like this morning. Several people evacuated and a few homes were flooded.
As for me, the airport, adjacent to the river, was not flooded so my 8:05 to Seattle is on time. So too was the Seattle-Kansas City leg. I'm home.
Leaving Juneau, I'll provide you with a bit of history. In 1881, forty-seven of 72 miners voted to name this place after Quebecer Joe Juneau, probably because he gained fame after he took 1,000 pounds of gold out of Silver Bow Basin, an area about 3.5 miles from downtown. That much gold would today be worth around $30 million, much more than Juneau needed to buy voters all drinks in exchange for their votes. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery about a mile from my home this week, the Baranof Hotel.
The Baranof was the 2008 setting for the FBI to use a suite to gather videotaped evidence against businessmen and politicians dubbed as members of the “Corrupt Bastards Club.”
The just over 32,000 people who make Juneau their home are visited almost every day during the summer by from 6,000-18,000 cruise ship day trippers numbering 1.65 million last year during the 22-week cruise season. On my day of arrival by air, Thursday, there were five ships in port.
During my short five day stay, I saw 30 different ships, each stopping for a single day. The biggest ship to call here, the Explorer of the Seas, carries 5,000 passengers.
That influx resulted in an agreement between the City and the Cruise Lines International Association in Alaska to limit daily cruise passengers to 16,000 from Sundays to Fridays and 12,000 on Saturday. Doing the math, it would seem that that limits passenger visits to 2.5 million annually. That doesn’t sound like much of a respite. Locals are lobbying for “ship-free Saturdays” which meant that any ship with more than 250 passengers could not arrive. The petition drive to put that measure on the ballot is ongoing.
The next group of chapters for this whale blog will appear on August 29 when I will leave Vero Beach for a complicated and lengthy trip to Aitutaki Island--a part of the Cook Islands--to swim with these amazing humpbacks. That will be, thankfully, in waters much warmer than these.
I hope you will continue to travel with me on this, my year of the whale.
