What is so wonderful about exploring in the Tracy Arm-Ford’s Terror Wilderness? The untrammeled condition of the landscape. Untrammeled, what a powerful word for conjuring a mental image. Picture in your mind’s eye a landscape void of roads, buildings, and other manmade accoutrements. That is the purpose of the wilderness designation, and we paid witness to the results. Today’s scene was made with the purity of hand that only Mother Nature could mastermind. Soaring walls smoothed and scoured by glaciers. Fringes of infant forest perched precariously on those same sills. And the punctuation mark at the end of the fjord, Dawes glacier; a massive face of fractured ice periodically calving with drama and splash impossibly large towers of imminent icebergs into the sea.
Our path through the pristine continued this afternoon as we navigated and anchored in Ford’s Terror. Named for the dramatic water conditions resulting from a geologic feature that creates a shallow and narrow pinch in the fjord, the result of which are standing waves materializing during tidal changes. Today our plans were choreographed to arrive at a less intimidating time in the tidal cycle. Enhanced by a light hydrating rain, innumerable waterfalls leapt, tumbled, and cascaded from unseen heights down to the sea. Deep clefts in the fjord walls held hidden treasures of ever more dramatic falls and hidden gardens.
Our day ended with a deepened appreciation to the forethought of those who traversed, contemplated, proposed, and defended the idea and ultimately the decision to leave parts of our planet untrammeled.
