I'll end this week with some more back water pictures. I loved this day of the trip. This area was so full of visual interest.

Some back water shots. It was a misty quite day and I was so relaxed.

On the way out of Glacier Bay we see one more from a distant then back into the open water. It was a rough day at sea on the return but it only lasted one day and one night. My sea sickness was minor and actually added to the excitement of the trip.

This glacier is very much a live. You hear the ice crack and every once in a while you hear a thunderous boom and see a chunk of ice the size of a house come sliding down into the frigid waters. Yes the last picture has a kayak in it.

In the last picture on Friday I said there were two glaciers. You may be scratching your head thinking I see the one on the left but all I see on the right is a trash heap. Well that trash heap is a glacier trash heap. It is a "dead" glacier. It is no longer moving so as it melts all the material it has gathered on its trip from the valley summit is exposed. Here is a closer look.

Moving on to where we will get to see more Glaciers which I’ll post a ton of shots of next week. The last picture in this series shows you two different types of glaciers which I'll tell you about latter. Can you see both of them?

Getting to the end of the train ride we passed this caboose which you can rent if you so choose. I didn’t post the picture of the girl who we picked up high in the mountains. She had dropped of an earlier train and hiked the highlands. The train will pick you up if you choose to ride back down but you have to make it to a place where the train can stop. Honestly, I only saw one such place.

This first picture was taken after we had traversed that bridge. Yea it is rickety and look at the heights traveled by those men and their pack animals! The mountain rivers look so harmonious with the scenes but imagine having to cross those icy waters in a time where rain gear designed to shed rain more than keep you dry.

These pictures where taken just after leaving the train station and as you can see the land is extremely steep and the curves on this “narrow” gauged train line are sharp. Yes that is the front of the train we are riding. I would have gotten out on the landing but it was already packed with people and they didn’t seem to care about their own safety not to mention those they where pushing around to get their shots. I played it safe and took pictures from inside the car.

Why I didn't take a picture of our train as it was loading, I don't know. I guess I wasn't inspired by the scene. But these four shots are from the train. The first two show you how narrow the trail was going from the coast to the gold rush area. This was a two way trail. It is only a couple of feet wide. The story goes that if you fell out of line you could be hours waiting for someone to give you a chance to get back in. At the top of this trial was a place where dead pack animals where piled up in the hundreds. The Canadians said the prospectors had to have enough gear and food to help them survive and the weight of that gear was over 2000 lbs. The clime up through these mountains was just too hard on pack animals who where not treated or fed well. The real shame is of the thousands of prospectors who attempted this Rush only a few found any gold and only a few of those found enough to have made it worth their while. Greed for quick riches and the disregard for one's own ignorance about what would be a dangerous and devastating try helps me to understand why nations prefer war to diplomacy so often in human history.

This portion of the trip back we were still on the bus heading to the point where we would meet the train and finish the return by rail. But I was just amazed at the volume of rock in this part of the country. Not stones or boulders, but big huge mountains of rock.

On the way back to the coast we stopped in Carcross. I'm not sure what industry keeps this town alive but they did have a Mounty Station.