YUKON TERRITORY Part 1 - Ferry to Skagway.

Went to Whitehorse with some friends a week or so ago. took the car on the Ferry to Skagway, crossed into Canada, thru Carcross and into Whitehorse, which is only about 150 miles or so from Skagway.  The weather was great.    Of course we saw Orcas on the way there - the dorsal fin of a male can be 6 ft tall!

My new camera is proving to have been a worthwhile investment, eh?
Skagway is a cute little old gold mining town.  That thing is the front of a Snow digging train!

I love this fountain!

The HATCHERY

I just found this unfinished post I started late last summer when the mass salmon orgy and death frenzy was at it's peak!   This is one of the most amazing things I've seen in my life.  To read about it in books and see it on nature documentaries on TV is one thing - but seeing it in real time is phenomenal.  First the salmon are fighting and literally dying to get up every freshwater stream in town.  They flop so frantically they'll flop themselves onto shore and not be able to get back in the water.  The sea is a swarming mass of salmon.  Then, after they do their spawn thing... they die, and carcasses are everywhere.  The entire Juneau smells like dead fish and the eagles and bears are everywhere gorging themselves.   I stood in a stream that was about 12 inches deep at the deepest and the salmon were moving past my legs, and crashing into my legs to get upstream.  It was cool!  This whole thing drives home so intensely the urge that these animals have to mate and reproduce.