Capturing the Moment

  One of my favorite photos of the day. This scene was on tripod hill, about 1,000ft up. The cloud layer was just above us, but we could see forever just underneath it. The lands now known as Cordova, Alaska were originally the home of the Eyak people. The story is that the Eyak people paddled down the mighty Copper River, then found Eyak lake stocked with beautiful red salmon. They decided to stay along the shores and never left. The Eyak people can still be found in Cordova town today, and a trip to the cultural center, Ilanka, is always high on my list of stops. Fast forward to the Spanish explorer, Salvador Fidalgo, in 1790, the current name of Cordova for the townsite has stuck. However it was the discovery of copper in Kennekott, and the need for a port to ship it from, that created the first boom for Cordova. From 1911 to 1938, 200 tons of high grade copper ore moved through the port of Cordova. The economy switched to a fishing town after the ore ran out, and it is still a ...

  View from the drone, high above our ship's anchorage on our first morning at Tiger Glacier. It feels good to be back in Alaska. After traveling through the night we felt our first piece of ice scraping down the hole before breakfast. We slowed down and pulled into a nice anchorage, a few miles from Tiger Glacier, in Icy Bay. This was Day 1 on our Prince William Sound itinerary on the Safari Explorer. While the guests were in breakfast, I sent up my drone for a few shots of our boat and the surrounding beauty. We spent the morning taking our small boats through the fjords and up to the glacier. A few giant slabs of ice calved off the face of the glacier. We rode up and down on the waves created by the icefall. I ended up picking up some of this floating ice so the guests could see it up close. We had sea otters with pups and harbor seals hauled out on the ice flows. A black bear was even spotted going in and out of the bushes, high above us on the forest covered cliffs. The advent...

  Three Amazing Days in Stockholm, Sweden This was the view looking left out of our hotel. A huge tall ship, with beautiful architecture behind. Stockholm is made up of lots of islands, so naturally there are boats everywhere. What an amazing ending to our whirlwind Scandinavia tour. We finished with three nights in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Stockholm. The Swedish capital escaped all of the destruction that WWII brought to the rest of the European capitol cities. Because of this, so much of the historic architecture, and so many of the old buildings remain. I was shocked to see photo worthy buildings as far as the eye could see, in every single direction. Day 1: Our hotel, another small luxury hotel of the world recipients, was the Lydmar Hotel. You could tell that it was the residence of some lord and lady, now turned into a boutique hotel. It was right across the water from the Royal Palace, and right next to the National Museum. I really felt like I was righ...