Glacier Bay
I step outside to the morning mist, and feel my world shrink around me. The sky has fallen, the sun is veiled, and my worldview is a white ceiling truncating mountains and shrouding visibility fore and aft. We must be in Southeast Alaska. We must be in Glacier Bay.
Stellar’s sea lions trumpet our arrival at South Marble Island. Gulls surf the air in formation while puffins draw our zoom lenses and focus to their orange beaks. The orange is striking against the skies of grey and seas of green. The water has taken on a subtle incandescence with the filtered light, our reward for the solar deficit above. Like the iceberg blue, the water’s green is best seen through the clouded lens of typical Alaskan skies.
As the National Geographic Sea Bird slows and turns to starboard, word spreads of two brown bears on the shore. Huddled on the bow, we silently admire the bears as they stroll along the rocks and eventually retreat into the mist and trees.
Further north we reach Lamplugh glacier. This truly is a special day, as fresh glacial snow melt forcefully gushes out of an opening in the middle of the ice face. The deluge juxtaposed with the still and stolid ice, the thick fog still hanging over everything, water in all its forms in all its glory performing its cyclical show, our glimpse into immortality and ecology educating and awing us.
Recently opened is the Johns Hopkins Glacier. Previously open only to pupping seals, this thick wall of ice, framed with mountains on either side and a hanging glacier nearby, seems to lift up the cloud cover to allow for better viewing. For such an impressive sight, we should thank the seals for letting us in to this previously prohibited nursery. As we make our turn, growlers hit and scrape along the hull while we head back out of the ice.
The temperature raises as do the clouds on our way back to Bartlett Cove, our dock and home of the Glacier Bay visitor center. After-dinner hikes through a forest of time give awareness to what happens when a giant sheet of ice comes in and crushes your ecosystem, only to melt away eons later. Rebirth and regrowth, in the order of ice melt.
I step outside to the morning mist, and feel my world shrink around me. The sky has fallen, the sun is veiled, and my worldview is a white ceiling truncating mountains and shrouding visibility fore and aft. We must be in Southeast Alaska. We must be in Glacier Bay.
Stellar’s sea lions trumpet our arrival at South Marble Island. Gulls surf the air in formation while puffins draw our zoom lenses and focus to their orange beaks. The orange is striking against the skies of grey and seas of green. The water has taken on a subtle incandescence with the filtered light, our reward for the solar deficit above. Like the iceberg blue, the water’s green is best seen through the clouded lens of typical Alaskan skies.
As the National Geographic Sea Bird slows and turns to starboard, word spreads of two brown bears on the shore. Huddled on the bow, we silently admire the bears as they stroll along the rocks and eventually retreat into the mist and trees.
Further north we reach Lamplugh glacier. This truly is a special day, as fresh glacial snow melt forcefully gushes out of an opening in the middle of the ice face. The deluge juxtaposed with the still and stolid ice, the thick fog still hanging over everything, water in all its forms in all its glory performing its cyclical show, our glimpse into immortality and ecology educating and awing us.
Recently opened is the Johns Hopkins Glacier. Previously open only to pupping seals, this thick wall of ice, framed with mountains on either side and a hanging glacier nearby, seems to lift up the cloud cover to allow for better viewing. For such an impressive sight, we should thank the seals for letting us in to this previously prohibited nursery. As we make our turn, growlers hit and scrape along the hull while we head back out of the ice.
The temperature raises as do the clouds on our way back to Bartlett Cove, our dock and home of the Glacier Bay visitor center. After-dinner hikes through a forest of time give awareness to what happens when a giant sheet of ice comes in and crushes your ecosystem, only to melt away eons later. Rebirth and regrowth, in the order of ice melt.
