Call of the Wild- Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska where the ice age lingers!

My trip to Alaska has been a great experience.  Never happened to post articles about the amazing national parks, glacier hikes, cruise, and wildlife earlier to this! I think about Alaska and replay my experiences ... every moment of it ... the severe cold, sleepless nights because of no night hours, day-long cruise on a rough ocean and sea-sickness, spectacular wildlife, snow-ice-and-glaciers, cheap hostels, road accident and so on ... Believe me ... unforgettable!! Kenai Fjords National Park- ice fields, glaciers, wildlife and lush forests! A place on earth where the ice age lingers!

Exit Glacier, is the only glacier in the park that can be reached by road. I walked up to the terminus. I wandered around solo on the less travelled trails and so happened to see a black bear with its cubs ... sorry no pics ... I was alone in an unknown land, it was raining, taking out the camera from the backpack would make some noise and Mama-bear would not like a lady-in-bright-pink-jacket around its cute-little-cubs.

Hike up the Harding ice field trail wasn't advised to visitors that rainy day. I went up a bit and returned when my waterproof shoes with extra grip started slipping! On normal summer day one could go up this strenuous trail to see the vast expanse of ice! One can have panoramic view of Exit glacier spilling out. The ice field has around 40 outflowing glaciers.

I went on a cruise to North Western glacier which is near to the highest point in the park (6450ft). The cruise started from Seward and sailed through Resurrection Bay to Harris Bay. On the way Striation Island was adding beauty to the landscape around. Thriving marine wildlife in the Gulf of Alaska is one of the must see item in lifetime. The marine wildlife I saw were- humpback whales, orca, dolphins, seals, otters and many birds. A humpback baby was having fun. It was jumping up out of the water and performed for us for almost 5 minutes before its mother decided to swim away with its baby. Orcas and dolphins were so fast, one minute they are here and the next moment on the other side of the boat- like they swam under my feet!

Well, the boat ride on the rough ocean-water was tiresome. Almost 10 hours!! Reaching up to the North Western glacier was fun. Sighting of wildlife brought all the excitement. Though everything around was grey and gloomy, cold and cloudy ... it was unimaginable!! On the way back, I got sea-sick. I threw up in buckets into the ocean ... but it didn't seem to make any difference to the vast Pacific! When I reached back my stomach was totally empty. I felt very hungry ... I remembered reading ... the best nutrition- taking control of your life ... so, I found a Chinese restaurant to have sweet-corn soup and fried rice. That hot starch tasted so delicious in that bone-biting cold! What a day and what a park?!! Almost like a dream!

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This post is linked to Our World Tuesday and Nature Notes.

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Scrapbook- A Travel Blog by Kusum Sanu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.