Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
Seemingly endless Alaskan sunshine may well be the lasting memory of today’s exploration of Glacier Bay National Park. Wow. Summer has finally arrived and we are basking in our good fortune. To see the high peaks surrounding this wilderness national park gives us a profound sense of the region’s vastness and the tremendous glacial forces that carved this large fiord. Our cultural interpreter Faith’s stories of the Tlinget people driven off their ancestral lands by the quickly advancing ice just 250 years ago brought home the scene.
Early in our day’s voyage, South Marble Island rang with flocks of Black-legged kittiwakes’ characteristic shrill cries and at least a hundred Steller (northern) sea lions held down the growling bass notes. In between flew tufted and horned puffins, the occasional black oystercatcher, pigeon guillemots, common murres and glaucous-winged gulls. High on the mountainsides, magnified dots of white morphed into mountain goats. Shapes began to coalesce on the beaches and a mother bear with two yearling cubs appeared – our eyes were coaxed into seeing the caramel-colored brown bears foraging in the intertidal by sharp-eyed naturalist Rich. On a nearby slate-gray rock a raven shape-shifted into a wolf and back into a raven, as those trickster ravens will. Our mother brown bear seemed intent only on finding enough food for herself and her two cubs, and lucky for us- the bears never changed their behavior while we observed them.
Behind Russell cut, a few members of the small local population of Kittlitz’s murrelets bounced across the water on their fish-filled bellies and a rare sighting for this place, a Leaches storm petrel ‘pattering’ its feet on the water’s surface to bring up prey.
After lunch, at the head of Tarr Inlet, we witnessed the majestic Margerie Glacier-queen of the inlet surrounded by lacy ice-dotted reflections. The great carver of this place however, hunkered darkly – now pulled back unto the shore, the ground rock of the Grand Pacific glacier was hard to distinguish from the surrounding slopes. Downbound in the bay, we relaxed and enjoyed the scenery, the sun, and a beautiful male brown bear on the beach.
