Glacier Bay
I can’t remember any other day when I have had such a hard time choosing a picture for the Daily Expedition Report. Glacier Bay is just that way, I guess; you could drop your camera on the deck and if the shutter went off it would take a beautiful picture. After a quite a lot of anguish I was able to narrow things down to four finalist images but the final choice really had to be rather arbitrary, since each of the pictures captured our day in this spectacular park in its own way. Three of the four were taken in front of Marjorie Glacier, far up into the bay, at the head of Tarr Inlet; this seemed appropriate since it is the glaciers that created the landscape here, and remain iconic of the region. Approaching the 200 foot-tall ice cliff at the face of the glacier, we saw a bald eagle perched on a small iceberg, perfectly still, facing away from us and toward the ice. Just once he turned his head to glance our way and that’s how I captured him, gazing over his shoulder across the glassy blue-green water, at ease on his icy perch. Moments later, just as we had been hoping, a tremendous pinnacle of the glacier detached and crashed down into the sea. I shot a quick burst and caught the beginning of the cataclysmic splash, just as the calm surface of the water detonated into spray, with another multi-ton chunk of ice frozen in mid-air, halfway down. The eagle remained unperturbed by all of this but a few minutes later he lifted off his berg and flew slowly away, silhouetted against the blue-white wall of ice, scattering gulls in his wake. Following him with my lens, I shot another series and one of the shots seemed to catch all the grace and power of his flight, perfectly framed against the icy Alaskan backdrop. Finally, there were the bears, two brown bears napping on Jackie Point, just a few miles south of the Marjorie. They must have had a busy and well-fed morning because they were completely sacked out on a rocky ledge a few meters above the water. Just once, though, one of them raised his head and I caught him as he gave us a sleepy once over, through the lower branches of a scraggly alder, before laying back down to continue his nap.
These four moments, captured in the memory of my camera, add up to only 1/100th of a second of our long day in Glacier Bay. Over a hundred like them are now in the memory of my computer and thousands more are recorded only in my own memory, all just a tiny fraction of the infinite number of such instants that appear and disappear every day in this glorious glacier-carved wilderness.
I can’t remember any other day when I have had such a hard time choosing a picture for the Daily Expedition Report. Glacier Bay is just that way, I guess; you could drop your camera on the deck and if the shutter went off it would take a beautiful picture. After a quite a lot of anguish I was able to narrow things down to four finalist images but the final choice really had to be rather arbitrary, since each of the pictures captured our day in this spectacular park in its own way. Three of the four were taken in front of Marjorie Glacier, far up into the bay, at the head of Tarr Inlet; this seemed appropriate since it is the glaciers that created the landscape here, and remain iconic of the region. Approaching the 200 foot-tall ice cliff at the face of the glacier, we saw a bald eagle perched on a small iceberg, perfectly still, facing away from us and toward the ice. Just once he turned his head to glance our way and that’s how I captured him, gazing over his shoulder across the glassy blue-green water, at ease on his icy perch. Moments later, just as we had been hoping, a tremendous pinnacle of the glacier detached and crashed down into the sea. I shot a quick burst and caught the beginning of the cataclysmic splash, just as the calm surface of the water detonated into spray, with another multi-ton chunk of ice frozen in mid-air, halfway down. The eagle remained unperturbed by all of this but a few minutes later he lifted off his berg and flew slowly away, silhouetted against the blue-white wall of ice, scattering gulls in his wake. Following him with my lens, I shot another series and one of the shots seemed to catch all the grace and power of his flight, perfectly framed against the icy Alaskan backdrop. Finally, there were the bears, two brown bears napping on Jackie Point, just a few miles south of the Marjorie. They must have had a busy and well-fed morning because they were completely sacked out on a rocky ledge a few meters above the water. Just once, though, one of them raised his head and I caught him as he gave us a sleepy once over, through the lower branches of a scraggly alder, before laying back down to continue his nap.
These four moments, captured in the memory of my camera, add up to only 1/100th of a second of our long day in Glacier Bay. Over a hundred like them are now in the memory of my computer and thousands more are recorded only in my own memory, all just a tiny fraction of the infinite number of such instants that appear and disappear every day in this glorious glacier-carved wilderness.
