Williams Cove, Tracy Arm, and the South Sawyer Glacier
When the Scottish-born naturalist John Muir visited Alaska in 1879 and again in 1880, it was to test the conjecture that his beloved Yosemite, in California, had been carved from the rocks by the action of glaciers. No glaciers remained in Yosemite, so he came to Alaska to see the glaciers in action. He travelled by Tlingit canoe exactly where we now travel in comfort in the National Geographic Sea Lion and its fleet of Zodiacs. Times have changed, but the landscape remains much as it was when first seen by Muir.
Last night we left Alaska's capital city of Juneau, heading south in Stephens Passage. Here the underlying rock, brought to Alaska over many millions of years in a tectonic parade of geological terranes (a concept that was unknown to Muir and to geologists of his time), is fractured and friable, allowing the glaciers to carve broad, straight passages. We turned into Holkham Bay, then called Sum Dum, a Tlingit word that describes the sound of ice being calved from Glaciers into the bay. An offshoot of Holkham Bay is Williams Cove, where we saw our first chunks of blue glacial ice floating in the sea. From the foredeck of the National Geographic Sea Lion we spotted a female brown bear and her two cubs foraging on the beach. Bears before breakfast on the first morning: a fine start to our voyage! They retreated into the forest, but the knowledge that they were nearby was in our minds as we disembarked the National Geographic Sea Lion for our first outing - kayaking over the still water of the Cove, and/or walking through forest that has developed since retreat of the glacial ice.
Leaving Williams Cove, we headed up Tracy Arm, which cuts into the mainland of Alaska. Here the fractured, metamorphic rock gives way to hard granite (the same as the rocks of Muir's Yosemite), and the glaciers carved narrow, steep, U-shaped valleys that we could see all around us. A glacially carved valley, now flooded by the sea, is called a fjord. We gathered on the foredeck of the ship in superb weather (a term that is rarely used in Southeast Alaska) to gaze up in awe at the scenic majesty that surrounded us. As we progressed inland, the trees became smaller and sparser on the landscape, and glacial ice increased in the fjord. Tracy Arm split into two branches, and at the head of each was a tidewater glacier - the Sawyer and South Sawyer Glaciers. Here, the action of glaciers on rock that Muir surmised is still in action. We boarded Zodiacs, navigating around the ice for a close-up view of the South Sawyer Glacier. Like nearly all of Alaska's glaciers (and, indeed, the great majority of the glaciers on earth), the two Sawyer glaciers are in retreat, disgorging chunks of ice into the sea faster than the glacier can push new ice down from the mountains above. Chunks of ice the size of a cabin, a house, or a condominium complex (if we include the 85 or so % of the iceberg that is below the water), in incredible shades of blue, floated in front of the ice face. Smaller pieces of ice provided resting platforms for harbor seals, and their round heads popped up from the water around us.
John Muir was fortunate to find the perfect laboratory to test his conjecture (which we now take as true). We are fortunate to travel in his footsteps (or canoe-track) through the beauty of Alaska.
