Glacier Bay National Park
And so we arrived in Glacier Bay where anything seemed possible. Where a land once buried in ice 5,000 feet thick now sings with life, reborn in the wake of glacial retreat. Where Steller sea lions bellowed and called, and tufted puffins strafed our bow and we stood on deck in quiet admiration, vaguely aware that some part of us might be reborn here as well, reawakened after a little too much civilization. Elevated by the wildness around us.
We picked up our park ranger Melanie Heacox (my wife, lucky me) dockside in Bartlett Cove, near park headquarters in Glacier Bay, and proceeded north toward the glaciers. A scalloped sky began to break apart as spokes of sunlight hit the bay and warmed our backs.
After sighting puffins, murres, gulls, cormorants, oystercatchers and Steller sea lions at South Marble Island we proceeded up the bay’s West Arm to watch mountain goats nonchalantly climb the dolomite cliffs of Gloomy Knob. “Look at that?” we said. “Could you do that? I couldn’t that.” Then came an hour off the tidewater face of Margerie Glacier, with one magnificent icefall after another, great 200-foot-tall columns of ice collapsing into the sea and sending percussion waves through the berg-filled waters.
We turned and sailed back down the bay, giddy as school kids who’ve gotten away with something, not unlike the way we felt last night after visiting Rosie’s Bar & Grille in the funky boardwalk fishing town of Pelican, writing our names on the ceiling and dancing to Elvis Presley, Motown and the Beach Boys. It was a first for the National Geographic Sea Lion.
But it wasn’t over. Is it ever for anybody with a rich memory and imagination? The day ended with a sighing of four bears in Geikie Inlet, two black bears followed by two coastal brown bears, and a pleasant walk for us all in Bartlett Cove, at the southern end of the bay, amid a chorus of soothing evening bird calls.
