Alaska Cruise - Day 5: Haines

The ship wasn't going to be docking until 11 this morning so it gave me a chance to visit the gym. Two gym visits in 4 days is pretty good I think! Proof that if I did one day book one of those 60 day cruises, I might end up in better shape afterwards? Optimism! Here's a shot of the view from the deck in front of the fitness center - not bad:

We had a wildlife canoe excursion booked for the afternoon so the morning would be self-guided walkabout. The highlight of the morning stroll through town was definitely the hammer museum.  This is basically one man's passion project based on a love of all hammers. A fairly non-descript little house that is just filled with hammers.

Outside was this Rube-Goldberg-machine type contraption that the twins had a lot of fun working. 

These were the "prettiest" ones, according to the twins -- the glass hammers. Yeah...unclear what possible utility they would serve besides decoration. But they even have glass nails!

Here's one for the pre-1990s crowd -- real hammers from Tim the Tool Man Taylor! (Yeah, another reminder of how uncool I've become).

More odd contraptions...

Hammers for cancelling checks (apparently in the old days, you use a special hammer to "stamp" the center of the check and the imprint would then indicate that the check was no good.

Downtown Haines was even smaller than Ketchikan. It was basically just two blocks. R wanted to show off the bracelet she made for the bear:

We also visited the Post Office where we mailed off a couple post cards. And then also checked out the "fort." I thought this would be like a real Fort (a la Fort Mackinac)...but in reality it's just a bunch of older style houses surrounding a large grassy area. 

This is a town that has a graduating class of 11 kids each year and that gets all their fruits and vegetables by barge once a week...so let's cut them some slack!

The afternoon wildlife adventure started with a drive out to Chilkoot Lake. We passed some more totems on the way:

And then....a bear sighting! (Credit to R for the initial sighting). This bridge is the salmon weir -- it forces all of the salmon swimming through to pass through a single gate so that they can be counted. How counted? AI hasn't taken over this job yet -- you literally have individuals sitting there counting the salmon manually. Except this kind of man-made funnel for all the fish means it's free food on a platter for the bears! I didn't catch the bear cubs off at the edge of the forest, but as we were driving in, the weir workers were trying to scare the mama bear away so that they could keep counting. 

Nice start to the wildlife tour! We proceeded to the next part in the lake itself -- obligatory family photo here:

The scenery here reminded Ian and I of Milford Sound down in New Zealand. The water was more green than blue though. Apparently this is because the glacier melt is pretty silty from all the ground mountain rocks in it. 

We saw a few bald eagles as we paddled, some were flying around but others were just perched on the branches. 

The lake was very pretty -- with the two canoes that our group was on being the only things there. Our canoe actually ended up being just the four of us and another family of four that we were traveling with -- private tour!

Since of the 8 of us in the canoe, 4 were children...we pretty quickly opted for using the motor instead of our limited upper body strength. 

We were hoping to catch more glimpses of bears -- the Chilkoot Lake is a known salmon spawning spot -- in a single day, they could have thousands of salmon coming through! Here's a shot of the salmon jumping around in one of the spawning sites:

The bright red color is evidence of these sockeye salmon being at the end of their life cycle -- apparently by this point, they've essentially lost all feeding capabilities and are just subsisting off of their own internal organs until they die. 

No bears at the lake...but as we drove back by the weir...the mama bear was still there! Clearly, she won that standoff with the weir workers -- no sight of either of them as far as we could see. Here's an action shot of her bringing the fish back to her cubs:

Pretty good day for wildlife sightings! We made our way back to the ship where I caught a few more shots from our balcony:

Guess where we head to tomorrow? I heard it's the capital of Alaska. Juneau? I'm not sure...we'll find out! (I hope people appreciated the effort that went into that set up!)