Kenai & College Fjords > Norway’s Fjords

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

Kenai Peninsula Borough, AK

I did a trip to Norway and investigated their famous fjords they have and I was a little “underwhelmed” if I could be honest with you. I’ll put something up about an entry I did there, but someone sold me on them, and I went to see them, because that’s the thing to do out there in Norway, but what I was expecting was something more along the lines of what we have here, in the USA, in Alaska! There is a reason people book to get on those huge ocean liners to tour Alaska, because scenery changes a lot, and it’s almost impossible for you to get bored while viewing the Alaskan landscape, even if it’s entirely from a boat! I can’t say that for Norway, because people with me, on that tour, they were bored with the Norway countryside. I had a little more of an eye on things to take pics of, or video, but it was just too repetitive after a while, and most people were tapped out from fjords in Norway, within 30 minutes of the boat trips, they were bored. That is NOT going to happen in Alaska, and you stay glued because you don’t know what in the world you’re going to see from 1 minute to the next. If you slip, you miss key things I’ll point out here, which puts Alaska above Norway in terms of fjords! Yes, I’m saying America has better fjords, or more entertaining Fjords, Kenai and College fjords, and not because some nationalist or psychotic person who claims to be PRO-AMERICA when no one in their entire bloodline has fought in any war for America, civil or abroad, nor are they active duty military, nor do they do anything for America but make money in this country- and besides, I’m Black*- I’m different. My people have fought in every war Americans have every fought in, this is MY COUNTRY, I am American, and my people’s labor is what it possible for this nation to be what it is. So, yes, I’m proud the USA has the state of Alaska and all of that beauty. That said, I’m going to promote America over all of these other countries. Check my resume on this site, it’s 90% about travels I’ve taken in USA! It’s not because I’m cheap or anything because it costs more to travel and stay in the USA than it does in Europe, or it’s equal in price. This is why most people don’t want to travel in the USA to vacation, they don’t feel they’re getting any real bang for the buck because they’re very ignorant of what is here in America! They are trying to show off and be fancy like they think they’re rich, by showing that they vacation in Europe and all this other garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I worked there and only recently started to travel there, but the USA has everything these other people have so let’s get with reality. Most people who read this blog are shocked that all of the stuff I’m showing here is in America and when we post to social media, I can see the people who are immediately booking travel to go to the same places that I outlined here. It’s clockwork. Some of them thank me and the fam and others I can see they just go and try to duplicate the same things I did, even the same pictures, but they’re going to even the obscure and remote places I know they wouldn’t even know about, because they’re not on popular travel sites and they’re not in other blogs and they’re not part of tours you can get on. A lot of the things like that are local businesses or guides I know or find, to get the off-the-beaten path locations that are not well documented in even Google maps, many of these placed I marked – or didn’t – in Google, which got me the kind of views I have, because I was adding a lot of locations to Google, to help them get started, branding each upload with this site, of course. So, I’m promoting American travel the most because these are right in my own backyard of America. I saw pics of the fjords, from some of my Indian brothers who are all older than me, but they were terrible photographers so didn’t take pics properly. They were not even paying attention to scenery of these fjords in Alaska and they also went pre-pandemic, so they came back with annoying pictures of overpopulated waters. I first went to Alaskan fjords when I knew the government shut down cruises, as soon as Alaska opened the state back up for business, even though the Pandemic was going, because people told me those cruise ships block your view and scare off the wild-life. I was disinterested way back then, but I did know what was there, in Alaska, and of course, we already knew about fjords, gorges, chasms existed in New York and Washington/Oregon. We even put together guides for some of you in some of these areas you didn’t believe existed in the USA, like in New York. We just call fjords “inlets” and “sounds” in the Americas, and because fjord is Norwegian in word origin, we look at it like that geological formation only occurs there, which is not true and we showed it here time and time again, that you don’t have to leave the USA, or even North America, to witness any of it for yourself.

I’ve been trying to tell people that they need to look around the USA to find places to vacation but people insist on only going overseas to take vacations, when the same things they are doing and seeing overseas is exactly what is already here in the USA. These people are not going overseas and learning anything from the culture, they’re not immersing themselves in the local cultures of these places they’re going to, they’re just paying a LOT of money to go to places they think are fancy, overseas, as if that’s going to be a big reflection on themselves when they come back and post pictures of that on the gram. They are mostly tourists, they’re not travelers, they’re not going overseas to learn and experience. They never come back with interesting stories of their travels, they fail to convince you that the place that they went to was worth going, they don’t inspire people to want to go experience anything. I was writing this entry, in my head, while sitting at a dinner party listening to a group of hens pecking about nothing. I listened in to see how they communicate their travels and all I heard was bragging about all the places they went, how many stamps they have in their passports, but nobody had anything actually interesting to share. They talked about outfits that they wore on their trips, hairstyles they wore on the trip, bags and other shopping things they bought on the trip, 1^st class seating they got on the trip, how all the people were looking at them because they jealous of these ladies, overseas…. 🤣 Dumb babble, nothing significant. By the time I heard that one girl say ‘Alaska’, and 2 others chimed in about how they want there, and they just proceeded to BORE us all more, I couldn’t take it anymore. They were all just 1-upping each other and doing BBL babbling, wasting time, they didn’t care to be in each other’s company, they just had nothing better to do. What’s BBL Babbling, you ask? Oh, well that’s when surgically enhanced women who get their butts, lips, balding heads, vaginas and face, and had no self esteem until they took ‘medical vacations’ to a foreign country so now that they look so fake, suddenly have pride and self esteem and talk confidently about nonsense that nobody cares about related to the sex they now can get from worthless but good looking men they couldn’t get prior to the surgeries, because these men didn’t think these ladies were street walkers before, but now do, so the men used them for easy sex. 🤡 We listened to almost 45 minutes of “I got that dokta on my speed dial, chiiiiiile!’ 🤦🏽‍♀️ I interjected, “did you do anything of note though, from your travels?” and everyone’s heads turned to me, like the Borg collective, all at once, one motion, one movement in unison. 🤣 The subject of Alaska came up, I ran down a list of things that I found great about Alaska after hearing this one lady mention that she went to Alaska and all she had to say was it was “so beautiful,” it was “so amazing,” it was “so awesome” and that’s ALL she could figure out to say. The group of women unanimously clowned her for “trying to be white” for going to Alaska until one of the BBL babblers told everyone that many Black women travel to Alaska and it’s a quiet thing to do, and that she was even ‘FLEW’D OUT’ there and did photos with a thong with matching fur hats and boots, then showed us the proof of her doing that in the snow at that guy’s cabin. I couldn’t resist now, I already knew I was pissing them off with my comments, and I like to be an a-hole at times for my own comedic purposes, and I just said “oh, well now look who is trying to be white, copycatting ‘snowbunnies’ who are famous for doing these pictures for decades” – ‘snow bunnies’ being slang for a European descendant women who take scantly clad pics in the snow, and that IS their known thing that these BBL babblers were copycatting, to be real. I pointed out the hypocrisy very easily there about them clowning that 1 lady who had been to Alaska, meanwhile these ladies only go to European countries to copycat European descendant female’s blog, TV shows, magazines etc. That one traveler to Alaska went on for about 15 minutes but talked as if running down a list of checklist items to do, and she wasn’t describing anything to anyone where you gain insight or become curious about anything she said. “The animals were so… OMG!” 🤦🏽‍♀️ uhhh these people never have anything interesting to talk about. I wanted to know what these people FELT about these trips they’re clearly BRAGGING about, and told them that they didn’t sound like they really experienced/enjoyed anything except for checking off ‘to do’ things they copycatted from European descendants, and surely didn’t see the real Alaska.

In Alaska, the two pretty much only went to the museum, shopped and ate food, and didn’t even want to pay for helicopter in Anchorage, Alaska and didn’t do anything in the realm of getting on boats to check the coastal regions, and that’s in everyone’s ‘to do’ list, yet they didn’t do that. I asked them why they didn’t go do a cruise ship to explore if they didn’t have ideas about what to do out there and they just shrugged the shoulder and said they didn’t know. They didn’t know about the how Alaska is famous for those cruises, and most importantly, the Kenai and College fjords and glaciers you see on these cruises. I asked if they had gone to see any fjords, worldwide, and they didn’t know what that was. I showed them pics and they loved the pics and were shocked that that was there. That’s how I know these are just tourists because any traveler knows very well what’s in Alaska. You can take people out of the ghetto, just can’t TAKE them out of the ghetto. 🤦🏽‍♀️ How do you not even know about glaciers in Alaska? Ok, maybe you don’t know the word fjord, and many don’t, because it’s a Norwegian word, but surely you know glaciers are in Alaska’s coastline. As I started to pick apart their trips, to find out what they did, I realized they didn’t do anything worth anything in Alaska, they maybe didn’t go but in a 6-block radius, and 1 or 2 trips to a zoo. This was disappointing to hear and just sounded lazy and uninspiring. My boys and I were going on about the glaciers and the change of scenery in all angles every few miles and how in the middle of summer you can see glaciers and such lining the fjords. These hens were looking at us like were aliens, speaking another language, especially when we were describing the fjords of Alaska. To their credit, one lady did know what fjords were, but she thought they only existed in Norway, and she said she went to the ones in Norway and they were “beautiful” and “special” and “pretty.” 🤦🏾 I asked her, have you not heard of the word famous KENAI FJORDS NATIONAL PARK or GLACIER BAY NATIONAL PARK???!! I got blank stares from all of them, and I just looked at my buddies like “wtf do we live in bizarro world or something?!” These are all in our backyards, including the fjords, not overseas, you can get a cheap flight for $300 bucks round trip to get out there! Then again, I wasn’t surprised, they were not that different from most people who just like to go overseas to pretend like they’re fancy because they went to Europe. I asked one lady to confirm if she thought France was ghetto around the Eiffel tower, and she didn’t know what I was talking about, then I showed her articles talking about this and a funny video some Black-Asian mixed travel blogger made about exactly that topic, so how did this lady NOT see what that guy was showing in videos yet she claimed she went there? Because she wasn’t really exploring ANYTHING. She went and took pics of her face with expensive clothing on, with the Eiffel tower in the background, and she left- THAT’S IT!!! Europe is good for some things, but the part that got me going was this one lady who went to the fjords in Norway, said that Norway’s fjords were BETTER than Alaska’s. I could hear the record skip, in my head, as she said this NONSENSE! Now the fellas were split on that take by this lady because 2 guys did agree with that, and I was like “hell no.” I’ll put up a blog entry about Norway’s fjords, after this one, but you need probably get a take on that place as a base for comparison, which is Alaska’s Kenai and College fjords, in Alaska, being the base to compare all other fjords to. Each has its own features worth seeing, so you’ll too can use this blog entry as your base before you go and see what’s in Norway. When I was in the Norway fjords, I saw many people were bored after just 30 minutes of any fjord you pick in Norway. Alaska’s fjords like Kenai and College? No way, people were active, running to both sides of the boat actively, looking at everything I’ll point out in a second.

Alaska has multiple fjords, and they’re grouped under what we call the Kenai Fjords National Park and the other side is the College Fjords in the Glacier Bay National Park, but there are many different fjords there. It’s KNOWN, and unfortunately, my people don’t know a damn thing about them, in our own country!!! Haram! Kenai and College fjords are surrounded by so much different geology and scenery, it’s so entertaining you cannot possibly get bored with that place! The fjords are also surrounded by many glaciers, and that’s another thing Alaska is known for that they didn’t know. Seeing the Kenai and College fjord and the glaciers in Alaska are THE things to do in the summer in the USA. But to hear my boys say that they thought Norway had better fjords, that was enough to kick off the battle of pics on phones battle. The ladies didn’t care at this point, but our conversation was much better than their boring hen pecking nonsense and we were pointing out the great things that people should be discussing about travels they did! We were going back and forth about great things we did, that whole night, showing these people how to have real travel conversation. By the time were done with our discussion, the guys wanted to hit up a couple more places together. That’s how MEN do travel and discussions on travel, it’s not flexing or showing off, we were talking about what we really liked and didn’t like about it, what we saw, what we experienced and contrasted the experiences. Many of these guys were learning to see the trips with photographic eyes, so they could be more detailed in descriptions of what they saw, as opposed to what the ladies were sharing, which was just bragging and flexing. One guy has a story about drinking the glacier water from a helicopter ride he took, another got off on the train, went into a bar, and became the talk of the local town as everyone came out to party with him, and he has VIDEO to prove it, as a Black guy surrounded by 40 non-Blacks. These were real EXPERIENCES, and when we turned to the ladies to share these, they had NOTHING to say. When ladies purposely under describe their trips, or mumble about things that are interesting, that means they were doing nefarious activities that get them in trouble or expose them for who they really are and what they’re keeping them so quiet, like one lady who went to MOCHA FEST. I didn’t know what that was until I looked it up, and had I known, I would have judged that lady much different! 🤣 The guys were taking over the conversation but it was hard not to, these dudes were sharing funny and interesting experiences and the ladies had nothing to add but eyeshadow and handbag tales. We invited the ladies to share more info but their conversation was boring, or they were being secretive in quite a few spots, so we just hijacked the conversation. I still couldn’t believe most of these didn’t even know about Kenai and College fjords, everyone knows Kenai Fjords, and maybe they wouldn’t know about Glacier Bay National Park because it’s too cold or something, but Kenai Fjords National Park, everyone knows world wide because it’s often compared to Norway’s fjords. I know people from all around the world who think like my boys, and I, think about Kenai and College fjords, that the USA HAS THE BEST FJORDS in the world! Yeah, I know, if you went to Norway, you’re yelling ‘HARAM!’ right now like the other buddies, but it’s true. I’ll slow walk it down for you, as to why going to Alaska to see Kenai and College fjords and glaciers is the best thing you can do to take in proper fjords, because you get to experience a unique environment that includes the glaciers, and a few other bonuses, that I did not see match, in Norway. That’s not the say that Norway doesn’t have great fjords, they do, but they are nothing like Alaska, and everyone knows this, which is why they pack up on the ocean liners with thousands of others to see these Kenai and College fjords and it doesn’t have the same level of advertising that Norway’s Fjords get. The costs of those ocean liners are ridiculously expensive too, and people don’t care, they still pack up for summer to go to those Alaskan Kenai and College fjords! Even I was swayed by the bombardment of adverts about those fjords in Norway when I was looking at Norway as a destination of a recent trip. Every 3 out of 5 adverts were for these fjords. I saw a bunch of ariel drone shots, acting from local actors, all this hype and normally, when I see this, I know it’s being oversold for a reason. The Kenai fjords though, if you looked up Alaska, there is so much to do there that you may not even get around to seeing that you can do the boat tours there, because most people are concerned with activities that involve going NORTH, to see northern lights, to do snow activities, do to dog sledding, to see Denali, etc. All that is in the opposite direction, and people don’t have the time to go the length of the whole state to see all of this in less than a week. If you want to go to the Kenai and College fjords, you will need to head south, not north of the country, and likely, you’ll be flying into Anchorage. At that point, it’s very easy to get the Kenai and College fjords just by taking a train! You don’t even need to drive anywhere. You go book a ticket and you’ll see there will be a packed Alaskan Railroad train filled to the gills with people doing the same exact thing! It’s going to take you 4 hours minimum to get from Anchorage to Seward.

The Alaskan Railroad train ride alone is worth taking because you get to see scenery that is straight out of a fantasy movie! Tip: if you get on that train, get on your RIGHT side as you head south and LEFT side as you head back north. You want the best view, this is how you get them, face out towards the water! Another tip, get on the train that is in the front, it’s the best views and most people are going to pack up in the back parts of the train to save money. You can get in the train that has the dome and offers better views, on the way to Kenai and College fjords. You do not need to get on an ocean liner either, you can go to Alaska and right on the 4^th Avenue in Anchorage, you can go into 1 of 2 touring offices that will give you trips. There are many tours there, they all don’t go the the same places. These tours can be up to 9 hours long!!! Since you’ll be going in the summertime, as Kenai and College fjords is not available in the fall to winter, you always have sun in the sky for that whole duration. That’s it, you get your train ticket, get that tour ticket it’s all there! Now, let me ask you, do you think there is an equivalent to that in Norway for 9 hours? You’re on a tour for 6 to 9 hours and if this was a boring experience, they would be out of business. The Kenai and College fjords are so popular that there are multiple competing companies down there in the Kenai and College fjords and the prices are all over $150 USD, so you think people would be coming from all around the world to go to this place if it were boring, just to spend all that money? I ran out of SD memory cards and batteries because I was recording so much, and the scenery was changing so much, every 30 minutes something new. As I said, most people were bored on the Norway fjords trips after 30 minutes, because most of those fjords looked exactly the same, and without the great waterfalls that the advertisement showed in Norway, those fjords may underwhelm 90% of people who do them. Why do I know? My party with me said they didn’t care for the fjords, they were passing out sleeping under the deck on most of the boat rides, they missed the scenery and didn’t care, they told me they’ll just check my video I made later… That did NOT happen with these Kenai and College fjords tours at all. I’m still in contact with people I met on that trip too, and they asked me about the Norway fjords. I told them I’ll put something out about them, but I didn’t want to oversell nor undersell them on Norway’s fjords. I told them to book it themselves, I described the good things, but I kindly told them, it’s NOTHING like Alaska, but it has other properties you will not find in Alaska. I didn’t want to completely ruin that, they were excited about Norway so let them go see it for themselves. All I can say is I’m not adding to that hype train, but I do hype up Alaska, you won’t find a duplicate anywhere and it belongs to USA, despite a history of controversy when acquiring it. You know it was almost NOT America’s property, right? This was another topic for discussion in that talk we had at the party, because nobody knew how Alaska became part of the USA and surely had no idea that Russians owned it first, they thought Canada gave it to us.

If you go to Alaska, you’ll see the name “Seward” on a lot of things in that state. For example, if you want to get to the Kenai and College fjords, the best place to catch your tour is in Seward, Alaska. The town of Seward, and Seward Highway (the highway you’d drive if you attempted to do the trip to Seward instead of taking the train) is named after former Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. He is known as one of America’s best Secretary of States, ever, for his accomplishment to not get USA destroyed by Europeans. People don’t know that PURE HATE the Southerners had for him because he was so successful, and people have no idea how instrumental he was to conquering the traders of the US Confederacy. All of this intersects with Seward, so let’s walk through a quick bit of history that made it possible for the USA to acquire Alaska, and of course, the Kenai and College fjords, and all of the natural resources of Alaska. Secretary of State William Henry Seward lived at the time of the end of the Civil War in the USA, in 1865, and he was in charge of trying to figure out how to empire build, after the USA lost it all internally, to help the USA prosper, after falling flat after fighting the Civil War. The USA was broke and weakened from the war, and Europeans countries were seeing that as a time to strike and gather up land around the USA, violating the Monroe Doctrine to not operate in any of the Americas. Napoleon III went to Mexico to act like he was there to collect on debts, but he was with his eyes on US too. France invested in USA instability, which they did from 1862 to 1867, funding the Confederates! Fun fact! All we ever learned of trying to rebuild the USA, during this time period, is only ever about American tycoons financing but traitors of the Confederate south, but your texts like to omit whole countries in Europe who were financing the Confederates in the Civil War, and are why the south even lasted as long as it did against the Union. Yeah, places like France kept the pro-slavery Confederates well financed with French dollars! This made Steward’s job very important, as he worked for Abraham Lincoln, part of the Union, to defeat enemies of the South and the proxy wars with France. Before Lincoln became an enemy of the South, Seward was their main enemy, and he wanted to be President too, and he tried to go around Lincoln to stop the South from seceding from the USA before Lincoln would act. He was insubordinate to Lincoln and needed to get handled, so he did, but he was well known to try to do anything to stop the south from breaking away from the USA and it is his idea to remove slavery from their control, just like he planned to get French financing out of the South! He basically said Lincoln was too much of a wuss to stop the south. Seward failed to usurp Lincoln, but he had incredible foresight to predict how the South would behave, he had always had incredible foresight and that put him on their radar. Lincoln got him in line, after playing Seward politically and silencing him, which ended up bringing them together as a major force that got the Union to beat the Confederates of the South. These were his two top strategies to defund the South. Seward’s strategies helped win the war, which made him a prime target for haters, but he was very efficient with trade and building confidence in the USA internationally. Seward was such a force, he got France’s first president, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III – not the one you know of with the Louisiana purchase, that was Napoleon I the military leader. This is his nephew.) and his forces out of Mexico, without having to fight them (remember, US forces were not so united after the civil war) and got the US out of threat because France had to be made to denounce the south and to stop funding it, and he was able to get France’s support away from the South! These are key steps that helped to bankrupt the traitors’ efforts to destroy the United States of America, and helps some of you slow people, at home, to understand that riding the USA of slavery was a military tactic of the North, to bankrupt the south and if former slaves came north, that would help the Union get more votes when they became free. The threat to keep slavery meant that if those slaves were counted in the south, in voting, would we lose the Union its power, another reason to fight to get rid of slavery, which gave the south too many huge advantages. Slavery produced sugar and cotton as the top products that went around the world, and sugar was a top commodity and the south was raking in a lot of money to fund their part of the war with this money from slave labor goods. Getting rid of slavery meant the country would need to find another way to earn money, and now you know why Seward went to buy islands in the Caribbean, which is why US Virgin Islands got acquired, and of course, the number 1 prize of this, Alaska.

That was a HUGE blow to the South. Seward was also responsible for exposing that Britain was ALSO investing in the Confederates and how they wanted the South to win as well, to destroy the USA. He got Britain to renounce the Confederacy, in what is known as the ‘Declaration of Neutrality’. The South wanted Britain’s money and promotion to the world as it’s own nation, so the South threatened to not send Britain any more cotton if they did not support the south seceding! I bet you didn’t know this! Initially, Britain was trying to promote the South seceding to the world and would back it in might if needed, all just to get a good deal on goods the user produced as a result of Black labor during slavery in the US! Without the British and French funding, the South couldn’t possibly succeed now, and this is what won the Civil War for the North, which is why the decision to end slavery in the South, was part of this bankruptcy strategy from Lincoln and Seward, and not some moral decision as history books like the lie and say it was- well not for Lincoln anyway. Seward was actually against pro-slavery so much that he publicly took a political beating for opposing the law to send any escaped slaves back to the South if they are found in the North and it made it mandatory and every civilian help, in what is known as the Fugitive Slave Act. Seward opposed this 12 years before the civil war even began, putting a big bullseye on his back with the racists in the USA! Lincoln did not end slavery entirely when the war began, he still allowed it in the North, all during the war, until he was forced to get rid of it in 1865. Another thing you may not know is that getting rid of US slavery was also from backlash to the Fugitive Slave Act, because it made the North the agents of the south, forcing the North to send runaways back and that law pissed a lot of people in the North off. They weren’t morally against it mainly, they just didn’t want to work for the South! Getting rid of slavery would free the North in different ways and Union generals would find escaped slaves and let them go, like General Butler, who cited that even capturing slaves during the wars were, and then freeing them, would bankrupt the south, more proof that’s the point of ending slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act continued into the early years of the civil war, so many Union generals were against it. Lincoln was against generals doing this, initially, but then decided that since so many generals were doing this, he just let them continue. Ending slavery was an end to a means to win the war. Seward also came from the Whig party, which was a Protestant group religiously, and in principle, slavery was immoral because southerns were not doing their own work by using slavery, and it was not adhering to the Golden Rule. The party split in two with Northern Whigs ultimately opposing slavery and this is who tipped the hand of people like Abraham Lincoln, along with other Protestant abolitionist like John Brown. Seward was the best Secretary of the State that the USA ever had, because this would NOT be the same country if he had not done these two acts! His third major act, that one took the cake, and that was getting Russia to sell Alaska to the USA. Russia was busy enslaving and infecting native Alaskans with disease, when they took over Alaska, initially. Russia ran Alaska into the ground and didn’t know what they were really sitting on, in terms of investment. When scouting/exploring the lands surrounding the west of the USA, US stumbled on Alaska- and of course, did what Europeans descendants did then, started otherizing and oppressing native Alaskans like Russians did, just a little nicer! 🤦🏾 He also went through all the Caribbean trying to acquire all of those Islands. This was an investment to set up trade with China along the coast, and he knew about the wildlife and natural resources of Alaska that Russia was screwing up. Russia couldn’t wait to abandon Alaska, so they sold it for $7.2 million thinking they played the USA and that was the worst thing they could do because Alaska has been the most profitable state since! The South tried to clown Steward for purchasing Alaska, they called it “Seward’s Icebox” aka “Seward’s Folly.” They were saying Alaska wouldn’t amount to anything and again, the South showed how dumb they were. Alaska’s natural resources have carried the USA since it was acquired. The states that gross in the trillions, they collect mainly on taxes not the natural resources or anything else. Alaska does not have that many inhabitants and still it’s one the highest grossing states due to Seward’s work. If Russia held Alaska, we’d not have the oil and gas control we have right now. USA went through the Klondike Gold Rush too, which made the USA rich! The foresight of Seward paid off in 1896 with Alaska’s Klondike Gold Rush and all haters were silenced forever A lot was at stake, and Seward did this. As part of the assassination plan on President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth’s team planned to kill Steward too, but failed. This was an elaborate scheme so someone had to finance this ring of killers but history says they were operating on their own. When roads and railroads came to Alaska, then everything opened up in the early 1900s, and tourism skyrocketed and that whole fjords area, and into Canada revealed all the natural beauty we have now. So there, a history lesson on why America is so great, how the purchase of Alaska was the best investment America ever made, which helped America not go bankrupt when the whole world was in a recession. American went through many periods of recessions and could have easily folded. Americans knew of what the Kenai Fords National Park is now, since the 1890s, when settlers went to live in Seward, Alaska but officially didn’t name it until 1980s. The story of Alaska is huge for the USA, which I was listening to on the whole 4 hour trip down to the Kenai and College fjords via Seward or Whittier.

Let’s talk about what Seward got and what the settlers and scouts saw, when they sailed from Washington state, USA, because they did go up those area why the Kenai and College fjords, the American fjords are better than the Norwegian fjords. You can look at some of the material in the videos and photos here, but you absolutely need to get down there to really know the experience I’ll try to describe here.  The first thing is that it’s pretty far away from Anchorage, so the trip over there will being amazing if you take the Seward Highway, or the train, down the start the tours for Kenai and College fjords. If you’re driving, you’ll miss all of the great action, so in my opinion, it’s a waste of time to drive and the train is better. Me and the team have been to Alaska, many times, and once we drove down the steward highway but did NOT go all the way to Seward that way, no way. We went about halfway, to a former military bases that the US military prepared for World War II, in Whittier. That ride down  Seward highway gives you a nice view of the water, or MUD, depending on when you go there, of the Turnagain Arm, on the way down south to Whittier. You can see the video to one of those trips here, which was shot with an old 360 degree camera. So, you actually have a couple of disembarkation points to get into the Kenai Fjords National Park, of course, and this is great for you because you can split up your trips in to various excursions and move around. One day you can stay in Anchorage, a few days, you can move on to Alyeska, and up top that mountain is a resort town you can stay at while you tour that area south of Alaska. From HERE you can do the excursion very easily because that’s 2 hours off of your commute to two major areas to do the Kenai and College fjords excursions, either from Whittier or Seward, or both since it’s not that much time to get to either now. It’s very expensive to rent a place to stay in that whole area, upward of $250+ a night, but it’s a time saver because the Railroad station is right down the hill in the town of Girdwood. You can catch the train from there, and do daily trips to the disembarkation points for the fjords trips, on separate days! I’d recommend this if you have little time but want to see it all in a short amount of time. You should know that if you go and drive there yourself, there is something I didn’t know initially, when going to point where Whittier is. The train and cars have to traverse the same road at a point, and then through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, and only 1 or the other can pass at a time. If you go and attempt this trek in a car, during a peak time of vacationing, you’ll be there in a line with 100 cars waiting for the train to finish passing, in either direction, before you can queue up to get your vehicle to eventually pass, and you’re competing with traffic two way on a 1-way pathway. If you scheduled a boat ride, you have to be very careful because that car traffic will make you miss your boat, then you’ll have turn around like an idiot and get back in line. The train has first priority in these areas, as always, you yield do it if you’re in the care, along with all the other vehicles waiting to pass through that 1 tunnel. The other advantage of the train is that the train isn’t going to be late, and the boat companies are expecting the loads of people from the train to arrive, so they cannot leave you behind or they’ll have no customers. Most people will have purchased the tickets to Kenai and College fjords as I suggested, from the tour companies while in town, or online, so there is no delay of trying to buy tickets at a ticket booth. They’re all pretty much in 1 area, between E and F streets on 4th Ave. The boat will not wait for you if there is congestion while you are trying to buy new tickets last minute. I’ve been fortunate to experience both the drive through the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel in a car and also via the train and of course the car ride is better visually, but I’ve already outlined the complete headache of driving to those locations.

Kenai Fjords National Park is such a mystery to most of the US and I’m hellbent on getting people over there. Now, that’s not the only Kenai and College fjords, of course, because if you get on the ocean liners, they’ll take you the whole way from the Kenai and College fjords to all the other fjords as well since you’re on the big boats so long, and you’re there for days on end, they can take a week or more to cover the whole coast of Alaska. Otherwise, if you get on the smaller cruise boats, you can go different directions on different days and you can cover Kenai and College fjords and all of the other fjords that are out there over the course of a few days so that you see the completely different views that Alaska offers. I’ve gone to Kenai and College fjords and the other fjords a few times, because I took some people with me the second time that I went to the area, to get me party to enjoy and see that scenery of Kenai and College fjords. I also split up the trips to different areas, from different disembarkations in different weather, so I got to see some wild scenery contrasts with the weather that was there. For instance, I got to see mountains with very green trees, and I mean really deep green, nothing looking like it was rotting, looking like the trees were perfectly curated by a Mexican landscaping team. Of course, the landscapes are all natural out there and nobody can touch any of that land, but they looked like someone manufactured the little islands that were scattered about with trees, and looks like someone placed fake rocks here and there, it just looks so well polished in some places that I could not validate that someone did not manufacture that whole area. Of course, I asked the ship captains if Alaska is artificially manipulating the scenery that we were seeing, and they emphatically said “NO!” That’s when I start to realize just how special Kenai and other fjords were at that point. These scenes you see there are like they’re out of movie scenes and some of them were in movies, apparently. The first thing that really caught my eye though, was that when I was first in the Kenai fjords, there were some really heavy fogging that hugged the mountain side of green trees. The tops of the mountains were disappearing into the clouds and you couldn’t see through the clouds either. The whole sky disappeared into those clouds and it looked like a scene from the video game Myst, with the rustic background smothers in thick fog that help the wood and the pine trees stick out more. That contrast between the backgrounds, and the blown out skies – due to the thick fog – made for a mysterious look that is like you want to go on the land and search for treasures or the house of a sorcerer. It’s summer, so you have the pockets of warm air, that meet the icy cold water and cold mountains with show, and that makes condensation, which is how fog exists. This whole area is nothing but this condition, so expect that but it won’t be so bad that you have a ruined trip because you can’t photograph or see far. The camera lens will get fogged up quick in some areas so keep a cloth around to dry it out. It is those kinds of scenes that look like Lord of the Rings or some mystic movie with magic. This is the kind of scenery that I thought would have been all over in Norway but it was only partially in 1 spot in Norway, meanwhile, every time I went to Kenai and College fjords, I had a scene that was very similar to the last time I went there because it was consistent. When the skies are completely covered with clouds and fog and mist, that’s the best experience because it felt anything with a color pops against such a cloudy scenery, if it has any color. Most photographers and snapshot takers do not like this kind of scene filled with fog, and they want to see clear skies and fully visible trees all around, they expect to have clear blue skies there. An Asian dude came and asked me why I was taking pictures you see in this blog. He asked me on 3 separate occasions what was so interesting, and I had to explain the scene and what I was seeing but he just didn’t get it. He is the one who told me he expected clear skies.

People expected Kenai fjords, and the other fjords, to have the very high valleys that they normally see in places like Norway, and they though that the fjords were supposed to be in a tiny inlet surrounded really high mountains. So, when they got to the Kenai fjords, they were asking “that’s it?” as if they thought they knew that the low mountain areas, and the areas with the tiny islands with plush trees, were somehow boring them or not matching up to their expectations. In those area with the low cliffs, or the Islands, you have to look around and that’s where you are going to find the wildlife finally. If you are in the areas with there is a lot of rock formations, then you can look around and you’re going to see different kinds of birds all along the ridges of the rock facades. I couldn’t make out all of birds, but there were a couple that were very noticeable when I did spot them. I spotted the typical Sea Gulls that you can expect around any body of water that is going to have fresh fish, so those are easy to spot because they have very identifiable white body with gray wings. There were some areas that were too overcome with those birds and it was like they almost covered the entire sky as they flew about. The almost covered the whole facades of the mountains they were perched on too. They still added to the beauty of the scenery despite them looking like they were going to attack us and hovering over and circling the boat like they were going to attack at any moment. What was amazing was being freaked about all of the bird taking dumps all over the people in the boats so people ran for cover, but if one stayed outside and ducked the bird poop fall on our heads like dancing between rain drops, there was a loud sound of water coming from somewhere, and I know when I hear water, in any location I’m at. I get happy when I hear that water falling and I was about to run under the deck to take cover from the bird poop but when I heard that roaring water, I was out there looking around for the waterfall. I could see from around the corner, water and mist coming out of what looked like the trees, and I knew a waterfall was right there around the corner of the mountain. Then, as we passed it, there was like 3 tiny waterfalls in a row, nested between the trees and shrubbery that looked like it should not be able to grow there because it looks like it was all growing out of the rocks there. I am not even sure how that shrubbery was able to grow, but it was glowing green and had snowcapped mountains, and that was what was feeding the waterfalls, that snow on the top of the mountains. It was summer, so that bit of heat that was able to get the snow to melt made the waterfalls, the funny thing is that it was freezing under the cloud over in Kenai and College fjords, same with college fjords, and it made since considering that area received a lot of snow that year. The cloud and fog cover helps the reflect the light back too, so that snow stays there into the fall, then by winter, it piles right back on thick snow. So that mix of green tress, with the green grassy shrubbery, the waterfalls, the birds, the thick clouds plus the fog, plus the turquoise water, many that really hit the spot for me photographically. I had to call some people to come back outside and get some pics because they were missing it some great scenery.

Speaking of birds, I huge bald eagle was moving place to place, like it was following the boat. I saw it move from perch to perch and I think it was looking at this big chick’s weave, like it was a dirty bird nest or something. It was just cartoonishly big and it was bright red, she looked like a street stripper and I’m sure that eagle thought that she was a Sea Lion or something, and I know it was following our boat for that lady. Then I saw it looking around at the birds, and I realized that sometimes you will see a bald eagle come around where there is other wildlife, and they eat the same types of food. In this area, they’d would be on the lookout for fish in the water of Kenai fjord and College fjords. I think the eagle was waiting for one of the birds, or the seals, to go to do the hard work, and then it would swoop in and steal their fish. I was looking at the birds’ location and then the seals floating on the sheets of ice that broke off from the passing icebergs that were melting and falling apart. I never seen an eagle in such a cold environment, and I had to go look that up to see if they even like being in such environments. Apparently, eagles are built for that kind of weather and they can handle that cold water too because they have two layer of insulation where 1 channels the water out and they dry easily to stay light. The outside feathers form a seal for it so it stays warm. I thought it didn’t want to get cold so it was waiting around to steal the fish because it was lazy. I didn’t think bring the big sniper telephoto lens for that trip, but I did get a good enough shot of it! If I wasn’t paying attention, then I wouldn’t have noticed when it was following us and because the scenery was so flooded with thousands of chunks of ice, at times, I didn’t know what I was looking at half the time. Some of the ice was dirty for whatever reason, and when you see so much of that dirty snow, when there is nobody out there to put dirt on the snow, then you know that’s why all the snow is melting at such an accelerated rate. That dirty coverage on top of the snow is dust and dirt from the mountains and there has to be a degree of pollution in there, I hope not from all the outputs of the boats, because there is nothing else in there, but it could be from inland too. Since science class, we learned that this is why glaciers are melting too fast and is leading to sea level rise. The snow is supposed to be able to reflect the light from the sun back, what is known as albedo, so that the snow does not absorb the heat. That dark dirt and dust makes the snow absorb the heat, as darker colors do, then the snow heats up and melts. As I looked around and didn’t see big icebergs floating by, but instead saw many tiny fields of pieces of floating ice, I realized that we were out there enjoying the melting snow, but meanwhile, that glaciers are retreating a lot due to global warming and this dust cover on the snow. When you head past the Kenai into College fjords, the landscape turns to all the snow and glacier viewing portion of the boat tours. We people go to these places and celebrate the destruction of the earth, really It was cool to watch the glaciers do what is known as cabbing, which is the glacier breaking apart and falling into the water. You can hear the sections of the icebergs breaking, like you hear glass cracking, then you hear a huge SPLASH as the piece of the glacier went crashing into the water. That was another amazing thing to witness, and this is all in Alaska!

You can look around at these photos, and video, these are nothing compared to the views you are going to see when you actually take yourself physically to Kenai fjords and the other fjords. You can’t imagine how wild it is to see that scenery change so much. It is like you get a little big of view that looks like Canada, missed with the snowy area that you know Alaska for, with the wildlife you also know from places out east in Canada. The Kenai fjords have all the things that people who go to the Norwegian fjords don’t like about the Norwegian fjords, and vice versa. I haven’t heard that many people say that they actually liked both. They are completely different in scenery, weather, wildlife- or lack thereof, and I’m here to advocate for the Kenai fjord in Alaska. Alaska keeps you engaged and entertained, no matter if you went the direction of the Kenai fjords or the direction towards the college fjords. Start to finish of your tours you can see the picturesque scenery as the backdrop to the birds, orcas, whales, seals, sea lions, sea otters, seals and just about anything else you will find out there, and you don’t get bored. You’re out there on a trip that is going to take you up to 9 hours to complete if you take the full one, and when did the best trip, it was just before the big cruise ships came in, so that was when all the wildlife came out because the noisy cruise ships were taking up all the space, displacing the seals on the floating sheets of ice, not scaring away the eagles, not scaring away the puffin, etc. That was the first time that I went there and it was like the pandemic was a great turnaround for the nature in that area, and just about all that there was to see was seen on both trips I did in this area. The smaller cruise boats, like I was on both times, they are conscious about the noise they make, so in some areas they would take care to cut the engine when they spotted a good scene for people to take pictures of, because they were afraid that they would disturb the wildlife and mess up your pictures. The smaller cruise ships are also better because the Kenai fjords one specifically would do a portion of the tour where you’re doing the orca and whale spotting. So, you ‘d go around in this boat, parking next to where some orcas or whales would be, and then they would cut the engine, and wait for the orcas and whales to surface, but they’d tell you where to look, and many times, the orca would pop up where they said it was going to be. You’ll also see Porpoises coming up to the boat, but they’re fins are so little, you barely will notice them if you’re not looking with a sharp eye. You cannot get this experience from the ocean liners, they way too big, they cannot maneuver like this, they cannot be quiet and if you are on them, you MUST have a telephoto lens or you will not see anything. I know many people who do the ocean liners and one time a guy posted his photos online and the landscape scenery looked amazing, but the you couldn’t see the fine details enough to spot the wildlife that I showed here, especially where you need to be very much on the hunt for them, like in the Kenai fjords. You cannot get the same experience on those huge cruise ships, that’s why I’m advising you to stay in Girdwood or something and do your daily excursions to the multiple disembarkation points on the smaller cruise ships. The smaller ships will also pull up close to some of the glaciers that are there, for eye popping views of a real glacier that is 10 meters (30 feet) from your face! They pull up to those waterfalls too, you cannot duplicate this experience in the bigger ships and that I think this is why some people are big fans of the Norwegian fjords over the Alaskan fjords, they’re not low enough to the water to enjoy it. That’s also, by the way, how I took in the Norwegian fjords, on a smaller cruise ship, for the same reason. There is just so much to see in Alaska, but in Norway, 9 out of 10 photos you will see of a Norwegian fjord will be the Geiranger fjord, and the photos will from a high vantage point, which is coming from the top of the Dalsnibba mountain in Geiranger, Norway. You will not see a lot of photos from actually inside of the Geiranger fjord, and that’s because people just don’t know what they should be photographing in a fjord that doesn’t have a lot of things to look at, unless you have a photographic eye. I’ll drop something for this soon because I actually just finished doing that tour this week, and there is a big difference and they’re not even CLOSE in comparison. When people describe the beauty of a Geiranger fjord vs like a Kenai ford, they are describing the beauty of the fjord when talking about Kenai, but they’re describing the architecture of Norway when they talk about the fjords there. That’s why I can’t believe when people talk about the natural beauty of a fjord and then site that the houses were so pretty by the water in the fjords – that’s man-made and it’s detracting from the nature and you’re not even describing the actual nature. Come on, now. How are you going to rate Norway fjords – and they only EVER put photos up of GEIRANGER FJORD not the others and without reason I’ll highlight in that later blog entry – better when all you’re doing is you’re rating BUILDINGS? Kenai and College fjords catch the eye! If you are going to hit up Kenai fjords, then here is the tour to take for the best bang for your dollar, the 9 hour cruise, plus you get lunch and dinner included! And if you REALLY want to take it up a notch, next trip, I have it planned to hit these areas on jetskis! Yeah, you can do these areas on jet-skis and pull up on some wildlife, hopefully a sea lion will not maul you to death. You can spend a year exploring Alaska and still not have seen everything in every way possible! Get out there ASAP!