Glacier Bay National Park
I can imagine few things more pleasant than starting a day face-to-face with a glacier—a day dedicated to glaciers and the landscapes they are responsible for.
Glacier Bay National Park was created not only as a testament to the magnitude of glacial erosion but also to the story of the cultures and animals those glacial landscapes have influenced. National Geographic Sea Bird spent the early hours of the morning motoring toward the source of the park’s deep fjords and polished surfaces, putting us in position to experience the park as an advancing glacier might have 400 years ago—slowly and steadily moving back south towards the park entrance.
Lightly veiled in mist and low clouds, the terminus of Margerie Glacier was our first sight. Situated at the northern corner of the park (65 miles NW of the park entrance) Margerie and her Canadian neighbor, the Grand Pacific Glacier, block any further passage north. Nestled between barren, steep valley walls, Margerie slices her way dozens of miles from the high slopes of the Fairweather Range to terminate where she does today. Not long ago she made our morning’s journey up-fjord in reverse, helping to create the fjord we used to travel to this corner of the park. Nowadays she is visited and revered for her opaque surface and tendency to rain down chunks of ice, but she was quiet and reserved this morning, complimenting the tranquil mood of the calm conditions and muffling clouds.
We approached Tarr inlet (home to Margerie) under a cloud cover and left the same way, slowly picking our way through a scattering of floating ice. From one moody inlet to the next, we traveled south then west to get to Johns Hopkins Inlet, home to a mile-wide tide water glacier of the same name. A finger of land named Jaw Point was the last thing between us and our first view of this massive body of ice and served as a dramatic reveal as a five-mile corridor of mountains soon became the only thing between us and Johns Hopkins Glacier.
While the day’s low cloud cover may not have satisfied everyone’s Glacier Bay weather standards, there was something magical about the calm reflective surface of the inlet mirroring a thin strip of rock topped with a thick meringue of clouds. Throughout the day these low clouds morphed and draped over the ankles of Glacier Bay’s iconic mountains but no one aboard seemed put off. With a multitude of sea birds; from murres to tufted puffins to black-legged kittiwakes, to an absolutely incredible bear sighting, including a mother brown bear and her three cubs of the year romping down the rocky shoreline, there was plenty to see in the gaps between sea and cloud.
