Category: Terrain

  • San Diego Zoo and Safari Park

    San Diego, California (2005) If you’ve been reading these travel pages you know our little guy loves animals. Naturally in San Diego we had to go to the famous San Diego Zoo and its affiliated Safari Park. The zoo was great (map), but the Safari Park had smaller crowds and more open space so that…

  • La Jolla Coast

    San Diego County, California (2005) Next we went to La Jolla with some of our family who live in the area that were kind enough to act as tour guides. We wandered down to the Ellen Browning Scripps Park along the Pacific shoreline (map). The southwestern corner led to the crescent shaped Children’s Pool, also…

  • Harding Icefield

    Kenai Fjords National Park, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, USA (July 2010) Flightseeing is a great way to view the expansive Harding Icefield (map) on the southeastern side of the Kenai Peninsula, a part of Kenai Fjords National Park. Tours operate from all of the major towns in the vicinity including Seward, Homer and Soldotna. Options…

  • Kenai Fjords National Park

    Near Seward, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, USA (July 2010) We continued on our exploration of the Kenai Peninsula, leaving our base in Cooper Landing heading towards Seward (map). Here we’d booked a day-long sea excursion through one of several companies that operate moderately-sized boats that cruise through Resurrection Bay and Aialik Bay, two of the…

  • The Homer Spit

    Homer, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, USA (July 2010) We drove along the Sterling Highway, curving south and passing towns like Clam Gulch, Ninilchik, and Anchor Point, heading ever further down the Kenai Peninsula until we could drive no further. We arrived in Homer and headed towards the famous Homer Spit. Part of the appeal, naturally,…

  • Southeastern Alaska and the Inside Passage

    August 1995 Southeast Alaska Travel Index We captured this image a long time ago on our initial trip to Alaska in 1995. We took a small-ship cruise through Glacier Bay and to Juneau and Sitka. Then we spent several days in Juneau where we did a lot of hiking, went to a nearby glacier and…

  • Exit Glacier

    Seward, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, USA (July 2010) The vast preponderance of Kenai Fjords National Park is not accessible by automobile. It’s ruggedly inaccessible with the easiest ways to see it by air [see my Harding Icefield page] or by sea [see my Kenai Fjords page]. There is one notable exception: Exit Glacier. It’s not…

  • Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel

    Whittier, Alaska, USA (July 2010) I’d long wanted to traverse the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel heading to Whittier, Alaska and the Prince William Sound (map). The tiny town of Whittier holds a couple hundred people where nearly the entire population lives in a single building. You might wonder why the government built a tunnel nearly…

  • Somewhere Between Juneau and Sitka

    Inside Passage, Southeastern Alaska, USA (August 1995) One of the benefits of small-ship sailing was our ability to fit through tight spaces where ordinary cruise ships would never dare to venture. To prove the point our ship threaded a needle between a rocky island and the shoreline, barely wider than the boat. The wall on…

  • “Out the Road”

    The City and Borough of Juneau, Alaska, USA (August 1995) We drove straight out of Juneau about 40 miles until we ran out of road. Juneau is not an island. However, it’s wedged between the Gastineau Channel and the Coast Mountains that completely cut it off from the rest of mainland North America. The only…