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All three aerial photos in this post were taken within a “window” of little more than one minute.
Their “star” is the same glacier, & fewer than twenty minutes had passed since “our” floatplane had taken off from the fiord immediately in front of downtown Juneau.
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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.
Leave a CommentThis and the next post’s photos were both taken within a “window” of circa 30 seconds, about 3 minutes after I took the…
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Merely two minutes on from the moments documented in #25, we were flying over the same lake, but had turned its “corner”.
Now, we were facing the glacier which fed the lake.
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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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This post’s photo was taken just three minutes after the previous one’s.
Circa five minutes earlier, our float plane had lifted off from Juneau’s Gastineau Channel.
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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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When in an “epic” landscape such as The Grand Canyon, one should always remember to look at the “near views” as well as the grand vistas.
However jaw-dropping it is to look down 1.6 vertical kilometres to the Colorado, there is every chance that something else – something equally worthy of your attention – sits within a couple of metres of your nose…on the ground at your feet.
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This post’s photos were taken within the space of circa sixty seconds, on the autumn morning of October 8, 2012.
In the unlikely event that one had never previously seen any images of the Grand Canyon, it would be easy to believe that this post’s and the immediately-preceding post’s photos were taken in two entirely different canyons.
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Our early autumn morning helicopter flight in October 2012 made it easy for us to see how very different were the Grand Canyon’s North Rim and South Rim.
The average “straight line” distance from South Rim to North Rim: 16 kilometres.
Maximum straight line distance: 28.8 kilometres.
However, the road distance from South Rim Village to North Rim Village is 346 kilometres; given favourable weather, a car’s driver should allow five hours!
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