Glacier Bay National Park
Many of us felt the call: A wildness tugging us deckside even before the early riser’s snack. At 0545 hours, faint dawn light revealed a crepuscular Glacier Bay. In the sky, wispy blued ovoids wink and blink.
Descending eyes absorbing a dragon-clouded Fairweather massif; horns, flying buttresses, arettes, cols, gendarmes, ice-filled couloirs. And the draping, carving glacier blanket; hanging glaciers, cirque glaciers, ice falls, crevasses, seracs all finally coalescing into tributary and main trunk valley glaciers stretching dozens of miles to tidewater. Blackened sedimentaries streaking/signing the glacier’s medians and laterals. A giant conveyor promising for a land and sea fiesta.
Bow-riding the Sea Bird, we are slowly advancing towards the glacier’s snout; hundreds of harbor seals indifferent upon their ice bergs, bergy bits and growlers. The fjord’s walls contract, its bottom sill rising and falling, we’re crossing to the final bathymetric basin with more than 600 feet of depth. A mushy-seamed surface comprising floating ice of every imaginable size and form…the Sea Bird can go no closer.
Our staff cued us for each tidewater ice calving: “see the dust falling there…that one might go!” and then visual serac and ice-wall tons collapsing seaward. Following a sound wave thumping our chests. Slowly, slowly the water wave follows, the glacier front kittiwakes returning to the feeding frenzy below the snout. Our bow riders hold the deck’s rail as the wave lifts Sea Bird.
Turning, sailing down fjord passing many of the 12 tidewater glaciers. Each making for a fjord estuary exceptionally sedimentary rich. Sea-bound, each nautical mile couple fast forwarding a decade in coastal temperate rainforest time.
A primary virgin rainforest growing tall and rich replete with healthy salmoned streams. And the spawning runs are on! King, Coho, Pink, Chum and Sockeye. And their predators...a coastal brown bear sow and her two yearlings salmon-feasting. Hauled-out Steller sea lions drapping the islets. Tufted puffins aflighting from their cliffy perchs to search and feed-dive deep; signing connections between sky and land and sea.
Many of us felt the call: A wildness tugging us deckside even before the early riser’s snack. At 0545 hours, faint dawn light revealed a crepuscular Glacier Bay. In the sky, wispy blued ovoids wink and blink.
Descending eyes absorbing a dragon-clouded Fairweather massif; horns, flying buttresses, arettes, cols, gendarmes, ice-filled couloirs. And the draping, carving glacier blanket; hanging glaciers, cirque glaciers, ice falls, crevasses, seracs all finally coalescing into tributary and main trunk valley glaciers stretching dozens of miles to tidewater. Blackened sedimentaries streaking/signing the glacier’s medians and laterals. A giant conveyor promising for a land and sea fiesta.
Bow-riding the Sea Bird, we are slowly advancing towards the glacier’s snout; hundreds of harbor seals indifferent upon their ice bergs, bergy bits and growlers. The fjord’s walls contract, its bottom sill rising and falling, we’re crossing to the final bathymetric basin with more than 600 feet of depth. A mushy-seamed surface comprising floating ice of every imaginable size and form…the Sea Bird can go no closer.
Our staff cued us for each tidewater ice calving: “see the dust falling there…that one might go!” and then visual serac and ice-wall tons collapsing seaward. Following a sound wave thumping our chests. Slowly, slowly the water wave follows, the glacier front kittiwakes returning to the feeding frenzy below the snout. Our bow riders hold the deck’s rail as the wave lifts Sea Bird.
Turning, sailing down fjord passing many of the 12 tidewater glaciers. Each making for a fjord estuary exceptionally sedimentary rich. Sea-bound, each nautical mile couple fast forwarding a decade in coastal temperate rainforest time.
A primary virgin rainforest growing tall and rich replete with healthy salmoned streams. And the spawning runs are on! King, Coho, Pink, Chum and Sockeye. And their predators...a coastal brown bear sow and her two yearlings salmon-feasting. Hauled-out Steller sea lions drapping the islets. Tufted puffins aflighting from their cliffy perchs to search and feed-dive deep; signing connections between sky and land and sea.
