Endicott Arm and Williams Cove
We wake to a kaleidoscope of ice. After cruising through the half-light of the Alaskan night, the Sea Bird nears Williams Cove at dawn where the waters are spangled with icebergs calved off the face of Sawyer Glacier. In the jade-green water they drift like chips of fallen stars. The silence for those of us on deck at first light seems ancient, inviting, broken only by the soft cries of Mew gulls and the skitter of scoters slap-slap-slapping their wings on the water in the long dance of their take-offs.
But the glaciers will have to wait. Instead we spent the morning exploring the softer side of nature – chocolate flowers and white-headed cotton grass, yarrow and sphagnum moss. Against thoughts of icebergs and the glaciers to come, the forest of Holkham Bay seems lush, soft and full of life as the group splits up for short beach hikes, kayak trips, and a long forest hike bathed in the flute-like calls of the varied thrush.
By late afternoon, the world has changed. We are deep into Endicott Arm where the air has chilled, stinging sharp as peppermint against our teeth. Just ahead rises the face of Dawes Glacier, one of just 26 tidewater glaciers in all of Alaska. The Zodiacs are lowered, and soon we are threading our way through the bergs. To weave among icebergs is to witness all the potential creative beauty of nature. Shapes change with every angle, with every lapping wave – a pillar, a human face, a bird frozen in flight. Shafts of sunlight burst through the clouds spotlighting the icebergs in turn, each one glowing with a nearly indescribable color -- candy blue, the blue of frozen chips of summer sky, the blue of water in our dreams. We cut the engine a safe distance from the face and listen. There is the sizzle of bergy seltzer, the plop of curious harbor seals vanishing beneath the water.
And then it comes. The sound everyone has been waiting for: a section of ice the size of a house, of an ice castle, breaks off and crashes to the water with the sound the Tlingit called “white thunder.” Dawes Glacier is calving. We watch in silence, in awe, for as long as we can and then turn back to the ship, shivering slightly but whether it is from the chill or from the enormity of the spectacle we have just witnessed, no one can say for sure.
We wake to a kaleidoscope of ice. After cruising through the half-light of the Alaskan night, the Sea Bird nears Williams Cove at dawn where the waters are spangled with icebergs calved off the face of Sawyer Glacier. In the jade-green water they drift like chips of fallen stars. The silence for those of us on deck at first light seems ancient, inviting, broken only by the soft cries of Mew gulls and the skitter of scoters slap-slap-slapping their wings on the water in the long dance of their take-offs.
But the glaciers will have to wait. Instead we spent the morning exploring the softer side of nature – chocolate flowers and white-headed cotton grass, yarrow and sphagnum moss. Against thoughts of icebergs and the glaciers to come, the forest of Holkham Bay seems lush, soft and full of life as the group splits up for short beach hikes, kayak trips, and a long forest hike bathed in the flute-like calls of the varied thrush.
By late afternoon, the world has changed. We are deep into Endicott Arm where the air has chilled, stinging sharp as peppermint against our teeth. Just ahead rises the face of Dawes Glacier, one of just 26 tidewater glaciers in all of Alaska. The Zodiacs are lowered, and soon we are threading our way through the bergs. To weave among icebergs is to witness all the potential creative beauty of nature. Shapes change with every angle, with every lapping wave – a pillar, a human face, a bird frozen in flight. Shafts of sunlight burst through the clouds spotlighting the icebergs in turn, each one glowing with a nearly indescribable color -- candy blue, the blue of frozen chips of summer sky, the blue of water in our dreams. We cut the engine a safe distance from the face and listen. There is the sizzle of bergy seltzer, the plop of curious harbor seals vanishing beneath the water.
And then it comes. The sound everyone has been waiting for: a section of ice the size of a house, of an ice castle, breaks off and crashes to the water with the sound the Tlingit called “white thunder.” Dawes Glacier is calving. We watch in silence, in awe, for as long as we can and then turn back to the ship, shivering slightly but whether it is from the chill or from the enormity of the spectacle we have just witnessed, no one can say for sure.
