Helicopter ride!

Yesterday Rick and I took a helicopter ride to the Chilkat glacier. It was an unbelievable experience. Thank you Paul Conti for encouraging me to take this excursion!
When you look up at the mountains from the town of Skagway they are beautiful and huge. But when you get up to about 9,000 feet in a helicopter and you look around you realize that those few little mountains that you can see from the ground are just a couple of the hundreds of snow-capped peaks in the Chilkat range. After about a 25 minute ride to the glacier, we landed on the glacier itself. I learned about how glaciers are formed and how they move. We drank water from the glacier and hiked for about 45 minutes before loading back in to the helicopters for our return to Skagway. On the return flight the pilot took us in close to a few of the mountains to show us snow slides and other glaciers in different stages of their lives. We were gone a little over two hours and it was unbelievably exciting.

There are photos of the helicopter ride in the photo albums.

We also went for a hike to a gold-rush era cemetery. The cemetery was interesting but there was a beautiful glacial waterfall near the cemetery that was the highlight of the hike. There are more photos of the waterfall in the photo albums.

Rick and I walked over 10 miles yesterday! Hiking is the preferred mode of transportation partly because everything is so close, partly because many of the best sights are not reachable by car, and partly because we didn't rent a car.