Wolf Song of Alaska put up a substantial and impressive wolf exhibit for the summer at The Mall at Sears in Anchorage. On Saturday, I set up a table there with some photos and pretty much wished I had brought a book along because it was finally a nice sunny day outside and I think everybody was out fishing or something.... However, I did buy a really nice chisel at the mall so I was happy.

We were done at 4:00 PM which left us with, oh, another 8 hours of good light left for the day. We decided to head south along the Turnagain Arm to Portage. Although the glacier has receded to the point where you can no longer see it from the visitor center, it calves into its rather large lake and the ice ends up right at the shore where you have easy access. Although there is a ferry boat out to the glacier, we opted to just take in the scenery and do a quick tour of the Begich-Boggs Visitor Center at Portage Lake.

I then noticed that the road to Whittier had been completed since my last visit here some years ago. Whittier is a small town on the western end of Prince William Sound which until recently was only accessible by boat, seaplane or train. I had never been to Whittier before so I thought this would be fun.

Through the little tunnel made through part of the mountain behind the Portage Glacier Visitor Center, we found a great scenic pullout where you could actually see the Portage Glacier. We were not close, but it was nice to actually see it.

Then on to the train tunnel...which was quite interesting. There was a very complicated fee schedule and you actually had to line up and wait about a half hour or so to go through. The reason is that the 2½ mile long tunnel was the very same one which the train used. Needless to say, it was a one-lane tunnel where you drove over the tracks. Setting the ISO on my camera to 1250 allowed some really cool looking photos through the car windshield.

Once we got into Whittier, we were kind of disappointed. There were some old derelict concrete military buildings from WWII, and a few shops along the docks, but unless you had a boat tour scheduled, there was not all that much to see. We should have planned and scheduled a boat tour, but oh well, we made do. We had a wonderful meal outside on a near perfect day with the harbor and snow covered mountains in the background. It was just burgers, but they were really good and the atmosphere was better than anything you could get in the Lower 48 ;-) I also had a Pick Ax Beer, a true Alaskan Brew.

While we were eating, Jeanette noticed that one of the many waterfalls had what looked like road access right up to the base of the mountain. So, after we finished, we drove over and were quite pleased to find a specular waterfall. The source was the Whittier Glacier, but you could not see the glacier from the base of the falls. It looked like the falls were spawning right out of the rock at the top of a mountain. We spent more than 90 minutes at the falls, taking long exposures by setting out digital cameras to the lowest ISO setting (50 for my Canon 1Ds) and closing the aperture all the way down to give a 1 second exposure of so. The metadata of the images have been preserved in the bigger JPG's so you can look the tech data up yourself if you have the right software.

I also took some photos of birch trees, I think these were birch trees. I like taking photos of trees, sometimes in detail. Sometimes just the trunks.

In a rest area nearby was a truck with the Alaskan version of a Denver Boot, I guess... Kind of quirky. It was enough for a photo anyway.

Back through the tunnel and heading toward Anchorage the sun was getting lower and lower on the horizon in front of us. It was 11:00pm and the sun was just beginning to set. We could not help but stop and take photos as the sun set over the distant mountains. Of course as Murphy's law would have it, as the sun went sideways along the horizon (that is how the sun moves this far north) it ended up setting right between two big antennas. Oh well, so much for getting photos of the sun setting in the wilderness ;-)