Our first day of the trip was an impressive introduction to Alaska and had no problem living up to the trip’s name, Wild Escape. Many guests were still asleep when the expedition leader called them outside with her morning wake-up call to take in our first wildlife sighting, a humpback whale near the ship. After breakfast and some orientation briefings, we headed outside into the pristine and primordial looking landscape of Endicott Arm. At the head of this ice-strewn, 25-mile-long fjord is the Dawes Glacier, where we spent the majority of the day exploring its awe inspiring creation of 2,000-feet-high cliffs of granite and gneiss and the thousands of icebergs, bergie bits, and growlers left in its receding wake. We were treated to a presentation on phone photography by photo instructor Lauren Buchholz on the way out of the fjord and an after-dinner presentation on glaciology and the Ice Ages by yours truly.