Cruise to Alaska Day 04: Wrangell

What do you do when your time zones are so off (FOUR hours at this point!) that you wake up starving an hour before breakfast begins?

You send your husband to the coffee bar to bring back coffee, pastries, and jam, and you finish watching Captain America in bed while you enjoy them!

We didn't have any organized excursions booked at this port, so here's what we chose to do!

We hiked Mt. Dewey, whose claim to fame is that John Muir once hiked here and built an interesting campfire at the top. Side note: when the kids got home and we were telling each other about our vacations, I told them about this and they both immediately shouted, "MUIR WOODS!", and then told me all about John Muir and their very interesting trip to Muir Woods! Yay for context! Mental note: show kids the Ken Burns National Parks series.

The hike is pretty steep and also, don't fall off of the boardwalk!

Matt wasn't always so sure about the height, but he was a trooper about it.

The views, of course, were worth it. You can see our cruise ship from here, as well.

Here's more of those trees on elevated roots that I was telling you about in Ketchikan.

And some more!

After we hiked down from Mt. Dewey, we hiked to Petroglyph Beach. 

The petroglyphs here aren't nearly as well-maintained as they were in Hawaii, but that made hunting for them more of an adventure.

Even though we did sometimes find them cracked.

Or buried in sand!

This is almost my favorite photo from the entire trip. It also seems to be kind of a thing in Alaska to leave your boat to rot wherever you're done with it.

This one is so much more elaborate than the others that I'm not sure that it's from the same time period.

Many petroglyph designs are unique to this area.

But many, bafflingly, are not. Do you recognize these circles?!? In Hawaii, the prevailing theory that we were told is that they marked births, with the indentation in the middle meant to hold a segment of umbilical cord, and the additional rings meant to represent additional births. In Alaska, however, we were told that historians don't know what these represent. Weird, right?

 After we'd hiked what seemed like all damn day, we got back to the ship and it turns out that not only was the day still going strong, after all, but that it was plenty warm enough to hop into our swimsuits and spend the rest of the afternoon at the pool.

And the lounge chairs. And the milkshake bar...

 Not pictured: the kid whom I bought a garnet from and whose friend gave us free lemonade; the shoes that I also bought, after finally admitting that the boots that I've owned for nigh upon a decade have grown maybe half a size too small; the friends that we've made (including one at the top of Mt. Dewey!), because it's easy to make friends on a cruise; or any part of the evening, probably because it began with another reception for our group that included free wine.