Tracy Arm
The Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness, located about 45 miles SE of Juneau, preserves one of the most dramatic landscapes in SE Alaska. Just before breakfast we “crossed the bar” in Holkham Bay and entered a 25 mile long fjord that slices through the coastal mountains and culminates at the termini of the Sawyer and South Sawyer tidewater glaciers. The “bar” is actually a terminal moraine of the Sawyer Glacier system that was deposited in 1750 AD, just before a systematic retreat of the glacier that left behind near vertical cliffs rising from the sea and an unseen glacial trough gouged out to a depth of as much as 1240 feet below sea level.
Along with steep cliffs come waterfalls--and we saw a big bunch of them on our journey today. The most spectacular was Hole-in-the-Wall falls that plunges down several hundred vertical feet from a cirque high above. As Captain Coughlin deftly maneuvered the National Geographic Sea Bird to a viewpoint within a few feet of the cascading torrent, we saw the eponymous “hole”, which was a pothole ground into the bedrock a couple of feet deep by a stone “drill” driven by the rushing water. To add some biota to the scenic formula, we spotted a mink working his (or her) way along the shoreline near the falls.
Just before lunch we encountered a couple of US Forest Service wilderness rangers paddling their kayaks heading towards Holkham Bay. The Captain hailed them on their radio and invited them to lunch on board. This turned out to be a big bonus, because they were happy to do an informal presentation on what they do—and they do a lot, from monitoring visitor activity, to counting seals, to measuring stack emissions from the few big cruise ships that venture into Tracy Arm
After lunch we embarked on one of the highlights of our journey this week—ice cruising in the Zodiacs. The bay in front of the Sawyer Glacier was chock-full of ice from previous episodes of furious calving (both of the Sawyer Glaciers are retreating hundreds of feet per year). So we had to pick our way carefully between the bergs, sometimes just pushing them out of the way, until we got within a quarter mile of the ice front. From this vantage point we were treated to the sumdum thunder and huge splash of a couple of sizeable calvings from the glacier front.
The Captain’s Farewell Dinner this evening was a celebration of an amazing week of travel through the waterways of this remarkable piece of the Earth. Tomorrow we will depart with enduring memories that we can share with friends and family—orcas and eagles, humpbacks and brown bears, soaring mountains and calving glaciers. We have seen the very best of Southeast Alaska.
The Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness, located about 45 miles SE of Juneau, preserves one of the most dramatic landscapes in SE Alaska. Just before breakfast we “crossed the bar” in Holkham Bay and entered a 25 mile long fjord that slices through the coastal mountains and culminates at the termini of the Sawyer and South Sawyer tidewater glaciers. The “bar” is actually a terminal moraine of the Sawyer Glacier system that was deposited in 1750 AD, just before a systematic retreat of the glacier that left behind near vertical cliffs rising from the sea and an unseen glacial trough gouged out to a depth of as much as 1240 feet below sea level.
Along with steep cliffs come waterfalls--and we saw a big bunch of them on our journey today. The most spectacular was Hole-in-the-Wall falls that plunges down several hundred vertical feet from a cirque high above. As Captain Coughlin deftly maneuvered the National Geographic Sea Bird to a viewpoint within a few feet of the cascading torrent, we saw the eponymous “hole”, which was a pothole ground into the bedrock a couple of feet deep by a stone “drill” driven by the rushing water. To add some biota to the scenic formula, we spotted a mink working his (or her) way along the shoreline near the falls.
Just before lunch we encountered a couple of US Forest Service wilderness rangers paddling their kayaks heading towards Holkham Bay. The Captain hailed them on their radio and invited them to lunch on board. This turned out to be a big bonus, because they were happy to do an informal presentation on what they do—and they do a lot, from monitoring visitor activity, to counting seals, to measuring stack emissions from the few big cruise ships that venture into Tracy Arm
After lunch we embarked on one of the highlights of our journey this week—ice cruising in the Zodiacs. The bay in front of the Sawyer Glacier was chock-full of ice from previous episodes of furious calving (both of the Sawyer Glaciers are retreating hundreds of feet per year). So we had to pick our way carefully between the bergs, sometimes just pushing them out of the way, until we got within a quarter mile of the ice front. From this vantage point we were treated to the sumdum thunder and huge splash of a couple of sizeable calvings from the glacier front.
The Captain’s Farewell Dinner this evening was a celebration of an amazing week of travel through the waterways of this remarkable piece of the Earth. Tomorrow we will depart with enduring memories that we can share with friends and family—orcas and eagles, humpbacks and brown bears, soaring mountains and calving glaciers. We have seen the very best of Southeast Alaska.
