Alaska Marine Highway System: Part 1 Haines

As many of you know, Jane and I spend part of our winter working at sport shows promoting our business. The reality of working the sport show circuit is that we talk about all of Alaska and not just what we do. So, after years of "acting like experts" about Southeast Alaska and the Inside Passage we thought it was high time that we actually visited this area of the state. There are two ways to visit this part of Alaska: by plane or by boat. We decided to drive our vehicle to Haines, Alaska and get on a ferry and travel the Alaska Marine Highway System. The Alaska Marine Highway System has 11 vessels that travel over 3500 nautical miles. On an annual basis the ferry's accomodate over 300,000 passengers and 100,000 vehicles. Pictured above is the is M/V LeConte which we boarded for a 4 hour ride to Juneau. The vessel can accomodate 300 passengers and 34 vehicles.

We purposely arrived in Haines several hours before departure so we could explore. All I can say is what a great little town. We aren't the only one's who think that way. The writers of Outside magazine ranks Haines among the ten most desirable small towns in America.

I thought the Kenai Peninsula had quite a few bald eagles but the Chilkat Valley (Haines) has the largest congregation of bald eagles in the world. I don't know who counts the eagles but the population is estimated to be 3,500.

We stopped at the Haines Visitor Center to find out what else we should see while we were in town and we were told if we wanted to see brown bears we needed to drive down to the end of the road to Chilkoot Lake/River. I'm sure glad we did.

There were three brown bears working on the last few remaining chum salmon entering the river. It could easily be their last meal before a long winter of hibernation.

Just to give you an idea of how close we could view these bears, that's Jane's elbow in the upper left corner of the photo. This is the closest that either one of us has been to a brown bear and I'm not sure I'd want to be any closer.

After our bear viewing we boarded the M/V LeConte for a short 4 hour trip to Juneau. In my next post I will tell you about our time in Juneau.