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Pelican Yoga Posts

Looking down (#30 in series: approaching Taku Glacier Lodge)

Our May 2015 dinner destination – Taku Glacier Lodge, aka “Taku Lodge” – is only 48 kilometres distant from downtown Juneau.

It is, however, genuinely “remote”.

No road reaches it; access is only via floatplane or boat.

The surrounding terrain meets any reasonable definition of “wilderness”.

It includes the world’s thickest alpine glacier, one of its most productive (wild) “salmon rivers” and part of the world’s largest substantially-intact, temperate rainforest.

All of this untamed splendour sits well within Juneau’s “city limits”, which extend to the Canadian border!

In urban reality, Juneau is one of North America’s smaller cities.

However, its designated governance “footprint” makes Juneau – notionally – the second-largest city in all of North America.

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Looking down (#28 in series: just part of one Alaskan glacier)

 

The immediately preceding post showed a small part of one of the same glacier’s obviously-retreating edges.

Not very many seconds earlier, we were looking down  – and upstream – at an unknown number of square kilometres of this still-gigantic “river” of ice’s surface.

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Looking down (#25 in series: a little further inland from Juneau)

 

 

This post’s photos were taken within a single minute, on the afternoon of 24 May 2015.

Our nimble, but not speedy floatplane was only eight minutes or so into our scenic flight from Juneau.

As you can see, the landscape was becoming progressively “bigger” & wilder.

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Looking down (#23 in series) on Juneau

 

 

On the afternoon of 24 May 2015 “our” floatplane took off from the Gastineau Channel – the fiord adjacent to Alaska’s capital city.

Juneau is a surprising place, as is true of all of the low-lying, coast-adjacent terrain on southeastern Alaska’s “panhandle”.

This “strip” is not a cold place, by northern North American standards, at least.

Snow falls are infrequent, usually modest. Much of the natural vegetation is temperate rainforest.

In “the season”, cruise ships disgorge huge numbers of tourists onto Juneau’s tourist-tacky foreshore.

In terms of permanent residents, however, Alaska’s capital city is a small town;  if it were in China, it would be a “village”.

Australia calls the likes of Mount Gambier, Albany, and Bathurst “cities”; Juneau is a little more populous than “The Mount”, but a deal less so than Albany or Bathurst.

Juneau is unique among capital cities in one crucial respect: no roads connect it to anywhere more than a few kilometres distant.

The mountains and glaciers just inland of “the strip” are so formidable that all visitors – and all supplies – reach Juneau via sea or air.

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Looking down (#22 in series) at a Perth footpath, in winter

 

 

The West Australian Perth is enormously bigger, much hotter, and very much sunnier than the Scottish Perth.

”Surprisingly”, the Australian city’s average annual rainfall is only moderately lower, although its rain falls on (mostly, straight through) nutrient-poor sand rather than fertile, moisture-retaining Scottish soil.

The Australian Perth is also one of the world’s windiest cities, and almost all of its rain falls quickly, in winter.

In summer a Perth (WA) pedestrian who looks straight down at a footpath will usually see only “lifeless” sealed/paved surfaces, edged with bare sand.

In a “proper” winter, however….

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Looking down (#21 in series) at Paddington & friends on Christmas Day, 2025

After a delicious Christmas Day lunch with dear friends, at 4.21 pm all adults present were still lucid, models of decorum.

However, it appeared that a certain, allegedly-Peruvian bear – and two other “softies” – had over-imbibed!

Right in front of my feet, there they were – sprawled across the floor, “passed out”.

I did not disturb the miscreants, but grabbed my IPad in order to document their louche behaviour.

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