Sunday, August 23, 1992 - Juneau, AK

Ate breakfast at a nice, clean, health-food restaurant, similar to the Good Earth. It had the unusual name of Fiddlehead, and was recommended by the hostel manager. Both the service and the food were excellent.
Took the city bus ($1) as close to the Mendenhall Glacier as it goes. Walked the other mile and a half.
The glacier has been receding 30 feet a year, so it's much farther away than it was the last time I was here. They've removed the walkways that used to go out over the glacier; the glacier's no longer there. We hiked up the East Glacier Loop Trail. When we were up about 500 feet, we could look right down on the waterfall and the glacier. Spectacular!
Walked through some beautiful green woods. Moisture seemed to hang in the air. We would have liked to walk farther, but the last bus runs at 5:30 on Sunday, so we had to return. Took a different trail than the one we'd come up. Passed a lot of old tracks, timbers, etc. When we got down to the Visitor Center, we asked a ranger about it. He said that back in the gold-mining days (1880-1944), the mining company had a huge generator up there. The tracks had been used to haul the generator and other machinery up the hill. The waterfall powered the generator, and the electricity went across the Gastineau Channel to the Treadwell Mine on Douglas Island.
We passed a lot of streams full of salmon struggling to reach their spawning grounds, plus the putrid, disintegrating corpses of salmon that had either made it or had died along the way.
When we got back to Juneau, we ate a delicious supper at the Fiddlehead.