Endicott Arm: Dawes Glacier and Ford’s Terror

I am exhausted! This was our first day of the expedition and an incredible day it was. At wake up time we were sailing up the amazing, vertical-walled fjord called Endicott Arm. Waterfalls were careening down 3000’ sheer walls of rock, a mountain goat was scaling one of these walls and icebergs from the Dawes glacier were strewn in our path. A few miles from the face of the glacier, the National Geographic Sea Lion stopped and we boarded our Zodiacs in order to get closer at the 200’ glacier face as well as explore the fjord from waterline. No picture can capture the grandeur of the explosions of enormous chunks of blue ice falling from the glacier and also shooting up from the depths and coming to the surface like a nuclear submarine in a movie. We also had a chance to tour among the stunningly blue icebergs and to watch harbor seal mothers with their new pups on ice floes as well as in the water. What a morning!

The National Geographic Sea Lion then made her way back down Endicott Arm to a spectacular side channel called Ford’s Terror. A huge fjord system fills and empties its tidal contents through a very small channel and the tidal currents through the narrows can reach 9 to 10 knots during maximum flow. We again jumped into our Zodiacs and glided through the narrows and into the magnificent, waterfall-strewn fjord. Incredible is all that can be said: wildflowers, amazing 2000’ waterfalls, river otters, mink, moss-imbedded spruce forests and beauty of every imaginable sort. Some rain fell but was hardly noticed in the face of such magnificence.

Back on shipboard, we had a lively session about photography and just as it was breaking up, and hors d'oeuvres were served, the call came from the bridge that humpback whales were surfacing right ahead of us. We all streamed onto the deck to see three of these leviathans blowing their billowy spouts against the shoreline and throwing their massive flukes into the air as they dove down into the depths. As we waited for the whales to reemerge, a big brown bear was spotted on the shore and we had a great look until it again disappeared into the forest. The weather had turned fine by the end of the day and the sea flat and mirror-like, reflecting the distant mountains across Stephen’s Passage.

It just could not have been a more spectacular day.