This is part two of our pictures from our Alaska 2000 trip in no particular order.  They're all scanned from photos. If you haven't read my trip report (likely!) I'll just mention that we were there with a combination of a small ship cruise and a land portion.

Brown bears, from the boat. This is as close as we could get without bottoming out. Not bad. Try that in a big cruise ship. We sat there for quite a while before heading on and were quiet enough that they ignored us.  It took a couple of times with the bears running off to get everyone on board trained to be quiet.

Lazy eagle waiting for salmon to get trapped in the shallow water.  We're on a raft in the eagle preserve near Haines.

Coming in for a landing. It was interesting to see planes designed to land on water, snow etc. There are people who pretty much just land on a grassy area in their back yard, and the yard may not be all that big!

Near Petersburg, which is a nice little fishing town. This is the kind of scenic pictures of Alaska that present themselves constantly.

Denali. We were warned that not everybody gets to actually see Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. The closer we got, the story shifted until it was "most people don't get a sighting" and then it became clear that a "sighting" would include seeing even a tiny tiny bit through the clouds. The good news is that the clouds parted for a few minutes and we were able to make out both peaks quite nicely.

This is at 12:58 AM in Fairbanks. This is as dark as it got that day. Fairbanks is just a little south of the Arctic circle, so while you don't get days that last for weeks like you would a little to the north, certain times of the year it's a close thing. Someone I know who grew up in Fairbanks informed me that this picture isn't very exciting, since of course it's light pretty much all the time in June so I've added an alternate Fairbanks picture of the botanical gardens.

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Travel Smart: Alaska This is the guide book we used. We found it to be extremely useful, focusing on what we really needed to know without wasting a lot of time on fluff. I find it extremely hard to do any kind of planning with the big "brick" travel guides and really appreciate not having to carry them around with me as well!

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See part one of our Alaska photos.
See the rest of Eljay.org - Travel Photos and Trip Reports

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