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Mystery Mountain

All that talk of travel yesterday got me thinking of mountains. Why mountains? Because I love mountains. Especially snowy ones like these.

Denali National Park (not Denali Mountain)
In the Denali Vicinity
Exit Glacier at Kenai Fjords National Park (note the people in the bottom left-hand corner)

The three images above were taken in Alaska. There are lots of snowy mountains there.

Mystery Mountain - Can You Guess Where This Is?

The “Mystery Mountain” is not in Alaska. And we did not actually fly there. I just thought it would be fun to pretend we flew there so I superimposed a shot of Hubby and I with an airplane onto the mountain shot.

Take a look without Hubby the airplane and me.

Mystery Mountain Without Props

Does that help make it look more familiar? No? Maybe a wider view will help…

Mt. Arundel

It’s Mt. Arundel! At about 20 feet (just over 6 meters) tall, it’s one of the taller peaks in the Arundel Mills Range. That particular mountain range is scattered throughout the parking lot of Arundel Mills Mall.

Yep, it’s a man-made snow mountain. It’s been almost 3 weeks since the last blizzard. The snow has been melting pretty quickly. But these giant snow piles will probably be around for a long time. They’re basically harmless in a mall parking lot.

Snow piles in the city are another story. Apparently, the trash collectors in Baltimore City are really having problems with them. You’ll have to watch this video to see for yourself.

Did I have you going with my mystery “mountain” pic?

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Snap, Crackle, Pop / 281

So, yesterday I said it doesn’t get better. I was wrong. Today was amazing. Actually “amazing” doesn’t do it justice. The scenery here is absolutely breathtaking. To top it off, it has been sunny. It is usually cloudy, foggy and/or rainy. All the rangers keep saying we are really lucky because we actually get to see the tops of the mountains. So even though it is still quite cold, it has been absolutely gorgeous.

Today’s activity was the Glacier Bay tour, a boat cruise up Glacier Bay and into some of the inlets to look for wildlife and glaciers. We saw both. As you can see for yourself in the pictures, we saw plenty of glaciers. We saw a good bit of wildlife, too: sea lions, sea otters, seals, humpback whales, two black bears, a brown bear (grizzly bear) and a wolf! The ranger who was on the boat with us said wolf sightings are very rare. In fact, she has worked here for quite a few seasons and said she can count on one hand how many times she has seen a wolf. We saw lots of birds, too, including Arctic Terns. Those are birds that winter in Antarctica and fly 11,000 miles each way to get to their summer home in Alaska.

Wondering about today’s weird blog title yet? Mike and I were trying to come up with a good one. “Snap, Crackle, Pop” represents the crisped rice cereal we felt like when floating in the boat earlier today surrounded by icebergs that were snapping, crackling and popping around us. The 281, believe it or not, is the number of pictures I shot today. Uploading them all to my Picasa page would take forever and a day. I only post a few so those of you vacationing “with” us can see the highlights. I’ll post the rest of them once we are back in Maryland with access to our dedicated high-speed Internet connection.

Tomorrow we leave Glacier Bay and head back to Juneau in that tiny little airplane. We’ll just be there for the night, then we fly to Anchorage where we can rent a car for a two-hour drive to Seward, a town at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula. Seward is the “gateway” to Kenai Fjords National Park. There’s lots of cool stuff to see between Seward and Anchorage, too, so expect to see lots more pictures!