Juneau: West Glacier Trail and Glacier Gardens

Last year, it seemed that everywhere we went experienced some kind of flooding shortly after we visited.  Our hotel in Kona, Hawaii was flooded by the tsunami a week after we left, the Italian town of Vernazza was demolished by floods and landslides a few months after our visit, and Chiang Mai and Bangkok each had waist-deep water within days of our departure).  It seems we have brought our bad luck to Alaska – yesterday a glacial dam broke at the Mendenhall glacier, causing flooding along Mendenhall Lake and down the Mendenhall River.  For a while the road to the West Glacier Trail was closed, but luckily the flooding only lasted a few hours and when we got there this afternoon both road and trail were open.  It was nice to do a little hiking after a couple of weeks off.

Wild Blueberries

This is a pretty scenic trail; it takes you along the Mendenhall Glacier and up the summit of nearby Mount McGinnis.  We ended up turning around before we got to the end of the trail, though.  There were too many overgrown bushes and downed trees on the last mile or so of the trail – it looked like the maintenance crews hadn’t had a chance to bushwhack it yet.

Since it was our last day in Juneau, we crammed in as much as we could – we spent a couple of hours at the excellent Alaska State Museum, and then took a tour of the Glacier Gardens.  We thought the Glacier Gardens was more of a forest golf cart tour than a botanical garden.  But the golf cart driver takes you up to a nice viewpoint with a pretty vista of Juneau at the base of snow-capped Mount Roberts.

Glacier Gardens is known for recycling downed trees into planters, installing them upside down and using the roots to hold the plants in place.

Three greenhouses are used to store potted plants in the wintertime, but in the summer they use the space as an eye-catching gift shop.

I loved the abundant displays of hanging petunias – so pretty!  Wish I could get them to grow like this back home.