Rough Terrain: Our First Big Hike!

This has been a weekend bursting full of excitement.  We ended Friday as a sleepy day, which we usually do.  I am always exhausted by the time I get home from work so we usually have pretty quiet Friday evenings.  We did find out that Cody starts working at Home Depot on Tuesday morning though! We are pretty excited for him to start working.  He was going stir crazy staying at home.  It isn't his ideal job, but it is a job that pays the bills for the time being.

Saturday morning/afternoon as a lazy one!  We slept in until 9:30am, which is sleeping in pretty late for us!  We are used to getting up so early that anything after 9am seems like sleeping in late.  We got up and made delicious cinnamon rolls and pretty much lounged around all day.  But, in the evening we got dressed up and headed over to Hangar on the Wharf for some drinks.  It was a lot of fun!  The drinks were pricey but we were able to sample some awesome beers.

Sunday morning we made it a point not to sleep in because we wanted to get in a full day of hiking.  We were a little disappointed this morning to see that it was only thirty degrees and raining (typical Juneau weather for this time of year).  It had also snowed so we were looking at some pretty slippery hiking.  But, we bucked up and decided to try it out anyways! It turned out to be an amazing way to spend the day.  We got to see and do some pretty incredible stuff.

First, we walked up to the visitors center.  This is the easiest access point to start the trail.  The woman in the visitors center forewarned us that while the trail was only 3.5 miles it was very rough terrain and would take multiple hours to complete.

Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center/ entrance to the trail.

View of the glacier-blue ice! 

We then spent the next 1.5 hours hiking upwards on a pretty serious trail (at least for us less experienced hikers).  It was a beautiful hike but fairly taxing.  The incline was steep and the weather conditions made it very slippery.

View from the summit of the hiking trail.  

On the way back down we were able to hike a little more leisurely.  The decline was more gradual the trail was more developed.  We stopped and played out on a frozen lake for a bit and enjoyed goofing around on the trail more that we did on the way up the mountain.

Specks and Cody out on the pond.

Finally, we made it back to our starting point.  Round trip we were gone for between 2.5 and 3 hours.  The sun was starting to set by the time we got back at 3:30pm.  We didn't realize it would get dark so quickly! 

The end of the trail.