Ash, Patti, and I had some free time after breakfast and before Kyle’s wedding started. That was when we checked out RainTree Quilting. After I’d bored Ash & Patti with a lengthy visit to a quilt shop, we still had time to blow. I suggested we go look for some Geocaches for Ash. He likes to Geocache whenever he goes to a new place, and we hadn’t gotten any done the day before.
The first Geocache we attempted to find seemed to have been purged by muggles in the few days since it had last been found. It was supposed to have been some where in or around the barrels holding up the sign for a park.
Before Ash narrowed the Geocache information down to the sign, we checked out the indoor skateboard park behind it, which is a city-owned and maintained facility called The Pipeline. Ha. Ha, ha. Ha.
Ash went back to searching for his Geocache while I took pictures of the skateboard park. It’s pretty sweet — certainly much better than anything Anchorage has to offer.
Once Ash had spent half an hour combing over an area roughly 6’x3’x5′ in size only to conclude that muggles had eliminated the cache, we moved on to a second one, closer to the wedding site and up a trail. I ended up lagging behind to take pictures of the vegetation while Ash and Patti went along to find the cache. Most of my pictures turned out blurry in spite of how good they looked on my camera’s LCD. These are some of the ones I kept.
One thing I found interesting about Juneau’s vegetation was that the leaves all seemed to grow in sheets, of sorts. This is the first time I’ve seen natural foliage that reminded me of 3D graphics like you’d see in a video game — like a texture painted on a bunch of 2D planes overlapping each other in 3D space to give an illusion of depth when viewed from the right angle.
It was common to see trees whose lower halves or lower 2/3 were devoid of leaves, though old branches remained attached. Someone told me that there are two main reasons for that. One is that tall, straight trees like this are perfect for bears to climb, so letting the lower branches die and break off is a defense against bears. The second reason is that there’s little sunlight, being a rainforest and all, so having leaves lower on the trees is inefficient.
Farther down the path was Lake Auke. It had water lillies growing on top of it. That was a pleasant surprise; the last time I saw water lillies in person was when I was seven going on eight, when my family was zig-zagging across the country to visit everyone we knew on our way to Alaska.
The path itself led to this bridge of sorts going right across one corner of the lake. That was as far as I got, personally, because I spent a lot of time taking pictures of the lillies.
My Flickr account has more pictures from both the skateboard park and our trip up the trail.