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All photos in this post were taken within a few seconds of each other as we flew over the “bottom end” of the Taku Glacier.
Circa 15 minutes later we would be back in Juneau, Alaska’s capital city.
From there, no road will take you out into “wilderness”.
However, by floatplane, an incredible array of “pristine” locations are less than 60 minutes distant – some, less than 30 minutes away from downtown Juneau.
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(aka “terminal face”, “terminus”, “foot”)
As at 24 May 2015…
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The headline refers to area, not population – nobody makes their home atop the Taku Glacier’s surface, which still covers 650-plus square kilometres.
i took this post’s photo at 7.39 pm on 24 April 2015, circa one minute after “our” floatplane lifted off the Taku River, adjacent to Taku Lodge, and we began the return flight to Juneau.
In less than one more minute – as you will see in the next post – we’d be immediately in front of the Taku Glacier’s enormous snout.
This is the world’s thickest mountain glacier, but….
Comments closedOur 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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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.
Comments closedThis 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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