The Alaska Sea Life Center is a great aquarium with lots of local animals, including the baby walrus that was just transferred to the aquarium (or the zoo?) in New York. We saw him flopping around and getting picked on by the larger and even more cuddly other baby walrus.
Captain Zaur!
And Captain Runyon! We didn't even have to wait in line or trample any little kids to get these pictures. Seward was pretty quiet on our first day.
Jellies! They had lots, we took photos, this one came out OK. Keep reading for the wild jelly we saw later on.
There's more to Seward than the Sea Life Center. This is an oil pipeline that loads ships at the docks. Seward is also a major jumping off point for cruises.
There's still a strong local color element too. We saw this "phoenix" taxi, covered with swans, at the grocery store and then a few more times in town.
Seward's cute harbor. Even though it looks idyllic, most of the boats are clearly working boats. Seward is at the top of Resurrection Bay, a long, narrow, north-south fjord that is protected on both sides by high, steep mountains. Resurrection Bay doesn't freeze in winter and is the central driver of Seward's economy.
Seward as seen from the water. The town is built on the estuary of Lowell Creek (see next photo) that used to come rushing down from the mountains behind the city and deposit a nice layer of silt that became land. Unfortunately, Lowell Creek changed its route every year and caused lots of terrible flooding and damage in the town. In the 1930s, a Works Project Administration team dug a tunnel to divert Lowell Creek away from Seward. Now the creek rushes down the mountain,, blasts through its tunnel, and makes a pretty spectacular little semi-urban waterfall on the edge of town.
Lowell Creek, blasting through its tunnel. This is in pretty high flood stage, and the water was pretty dirty. On later days the water got clearer and the volume decreased a smidge. It's really impressive when you know the back story!
This is our hotel cottage. It's really and truly right on the water's edge. This photo is taken at low tide; at high tide the water splashes up on the little front porch!
One of the benefits of being so close to the water is the wildlife. This is a bald eagle that came to check out the tidepools. He stayed for about 30 minutes.
There were also sea otters everywhere. Here's a close-up!
And splashing together. Sea otters are adorable.
This is the road to our little cottage. It's also right along the water and is pretty wet at high tide!
Another view of the road to our cottage. That's an RV. I like picture because of the sense of scale it gives. Alaska is huge in all directions!
We had planned a great 6-hour boat tour from Seward to see the glaciers and lots of marine life, but the storm had churned up the ocean so badly that even the cruise ships couldn't get in to Glacier Bay. Apparently outside of Resurrection Bay, the seas were reaching 28 feet -- entirely too rough for a tourist catamaran. So we went on a truncated tour of Resurrection Bay, and it was sufficiently cold and windy to be very impressive. We had a wonderful time, and eventually the sun came out and made it quite pleasant if windy!
Looking south down Resurrection Bay. The next shots are epic landscape shots, and most of them won't have captions.
This is looking out at open ocean. It looks serene in the photo, but the catamaran struggled with the rough sea.
The "Exit Glacier" is actually two glaciers that collided. The dark line down the middle is the place where they met. That's about as close as we could get to a glacier on this trip!
As wild and huge and empty as it feels, Alaska still has traces of human occupation in unlikely corners. This is an old mine shaft. Some unhappy person went into this tiny hole in the ground, about 6 feet about the ocean level, to look for gold at some point. Of all the things I'm glad I'm not, miner is high on the list.
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