We had wanted to visit the Mendenhall glacier, and we had planned to book a local shuttle bus to take us. Unfortunately, Juneau recently restricted passes to the glacier, and the shuttle busses that dropped you off and picked you up on the half hour can no longer do that, at least in 2023. Luckily, we were able to snag a ship excursion for a little bit more money.

Mendenhall Glacier excursion

After breakfast in the buffet, we left the ship to wait on our bus. It came a bit early and we met our driver, Jerry. I really liked him, he gave us a town tour as we drove toward the glacier, and some funny facts. I’d tour with him again.

He dropped us off a bit early, and told us to be back where he dropped us off at 11:30 am to go back to the ship. That gave us a bit over two hours to explore the area. That was plenty of time. First off, we took pictures of the glacier from the parking lot area. This is where you’ll get the best glacier pictures. There is also a Tongass National Park sign for a photo op.

First we walked to the glacier and waterfall area. It is quite a hike, and there are bear in the area, but we didn’t see any, thank goodness. We did find some bear scat though. It probably took us 20 – 25 minutes to get all the way to the huge waterfall, but it was worth it. It’s a gorgeous area. You can’t see a lot of the glacier from there, but you can get pretty close to the waterfall. The hike itself has some wonderful scenery. I was kind of busy watching for bears, but I did notice some of it.

After the hike, we went over to the Steep Creek hiking trail. Most of the trail is closed in August because of bear activity, but the boardwalk part is open. There is a gate on each end to keep bears out. I was hoping to see bears below in the creek area, but we didn’t see any. We did see Salmon swimming upstream to spawn. We also saw a heron of some sort, some ducks, and some ravens. My husband found a porcupine in a tree, and I saw a rabbit and a squirrel. That’s the extent of our wildlife viewing.

After that we went to the visitors center to look around a bit. There are restrooms in the Visitors Center, there were actually plenty of restrooms in the whole area. The place was crowded though, and there were lines for all the restrooms. After that we hopped back on our bus with Jerry and went back to the cruise ship.

The afternoon in Juneau

After we got back to the ship, we had some lunch then headed back outside to Juneau. We were on the Franklin dock, which is close to town. Our first plan had bin to walk down to the big Whale Fountain, but we didn’t realize how far it was from town down the main street. We made it about halfway, but my feet hurt and I still wanted to explore the town.

Juneau is a cute small town with lots and lots of shops. And a lot of jewelry shops. There were a lot of ships in town, so it was pretty crowded. You can also find some good food, including crab and fish tacos. We found some cute T-Shirts at the Alaska Shirt Company for good prices. Juneau actually has some of the better prices on souvenirs that we found in Alaska. We also saw an Eagle up in a tree. So far we hadn’t seen many of them, so it was a good photo opportunity. By this time my feet really hurt, we’d done at least 20,000 steps so we decided to go back to the ship for dinner.

The rest of the night

We went to dinner at our regular time at Michaelangelos Restaurant. Our waiters are Lorenzo and Awmi, and they’ve been good. For a starter I chose Insalata Mista. It’s basically a salad with kale, tomatoes, cucumbers , and olives. It was okay, not my favorite. I also had French Onion soup, which was good. For my entree I had Chicken Parmigiana with spaghetti and sauce. Lorenzo talked me into also ordering a special entree not on the menu. I don’t know the name, but it was penne pasta, with a spicy garlic sauce. It was spicy, but good. For dessert I had chocolate ice cream with caramel sauce. I didn’t see anything else that really appealed to me.

We were planning on going to the Comedy show at 7:30, but when we got to the theater, a lady was talking about dogsleds and the Iditarod. I guess she was the first woman who won the Iditarod, and it was interesting. We watched that, and then went back to the room to relax before bedtime. Busy day tomorrow in Icy Straight Point. We need our rest, my feet are tired.