Our stay in Seward, Alaska

In addition to watching the Mt. Marathon Race, we have hiked and sea kayaked here in Seward.  Yesterday we hiked part way up the trail to Mt. Alice.  This is a hike which only the locals seem to know about.  A woman we stood next to us at the race told us about it.  She told us the road it was on but when we drove down there, there was no trail marker.  We finally asked a local fisherman down at the boat launch ramp, and he ended up leading us back to the trailhead which turned out to be a muddy place leading steeply up into the woods on the side of the road.  Once we got up the ravine on the side of the road, we were in the rain forest and on a pretty decently maintained trail.  Here is a photo of all the moss on the trees.  As you can see, the trees were just "dripping" with moss.   Luckily, it was not raining, too.
 

We hiked UP this steep trail until we came to the snow.  Since we were the only ones there and it was deep in the woods, we had our bear spray.  To make plenty of noise, we talked, sang, and clicked our hiking poles together.  Luckily, we did not encounter any bears or see any signs of them.  We lost the trail once we got to the snowline.  The snow got pretty deep, so we decided to stop there.  We ate our lunch and hiked back down.  Here is a photo of Bill at the snow line.  We never did make it up to Mt. Alice. 

The next day we did a 5 mile sea kayaking trip out to Caines Head State Park.  We went with a very young guide and a family from Charleston, SC.  The company would not let us rent the kayaks by ourselves.  They insisted that we have a guide since we were not experts in cold water rescue.  Somehow we didn't feel very confident once we saw our guide -- a nice enough young college student who had only been in Alaska since May.  Anyway, it turned out to be a very nice sea kayaking adventure, in spite of a light rain.  Bill says:  as we were beaching the tandem kayak that we were in, I managed to turn it sideways which was not the preferred orientation.  A wave arrived simultaneously and washed over Sally's end of the kayak and into her non waterproof kayaking skirt.  She got soaked.  Bill was to blame.  It was cold.  Cotton kills. A forgotten part of her wardrobe was cotton. Sally was not a happy camper.  I was made aware she was not happy.  In the end, all turned out well.

 At the end of the trip, when we were on the boat for our water taxi ride back to the dock, we saw two humpback whales.  The captain got the boat close enough that we could actually smell their "breath" when they sprayed out of their Blow Hole.  It smelled sort of like fishy sewer gas!! 

We will try to post a whale photo later.  It does not seem to be downloading now on this weak WiFi network. 

Sally