Pandemic Diaries - Year 2, August Part III

17 August, Day 4 – Glacier Bay and Icy Point Strait

 

Much of Day 4 was spent cruising Glacier Bay, looking at (you guessed it!) glaciers.  Old glaciers.  Ancient glaciers.  Beautiful snowy white and icy blue glaciers.  One glacier so old, it’s almost black with accumulated gravel, dirt, and debris it has picked up over the millennia as it has slowly moved downhill. 

Glacier Bay is currently about 65 miles long (105 km).  I say currently because Glacier Bay has been changing size for tens of thousands of years, if not more.  Geological evidence shows that ice sheets covering entire continents came and went for about seven million years.  Yes, 7,000,000 years or so.  Eventually the Greater Ice Age stopped, but there have been various lesser ice ages since that time.  The Little Ice Age is the name given to the more recent advance of glaciers in the northern regions of the Earth, culminating roughly in the year 1750, when the entire Glacier Bay area was under ice.

 

When the Tlingit nation, the first people to live around the bay, arrived some 9000 or 10,000 years ago, they were able to settle on the shores of Glacier Bay.  Then the glaciers moved closer to the waters of the bay in that Little Ice Age, driving the people further south among the islands of the Alaskan panhandle. 

 

I personally find that fact mind-boggling.  Somehow ice ages seem like a thing of the far away past, ancient history like dinosaurs.  The fact that there are people living today whose oral history includes a recent ice age is just amazing!

 

The ice receded enough that Captain George Vancouver was able to sail a bit in Glacier Bay in 1794, though he described it as “a sheet of ice as far as the eye could distinguish.”  That ice has continued to recede, and when we saw Glacier Bay, most of the shoreline was visible.

 

The National Park Service manages Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, and one of the park rangers joined our cruise for the day.  She talked about the glaciers, the animals we might see, and the history of the bay and its glaciers.

 

Also designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, Glacier Bay National Park covers over 3.2 million acres of forest, water, and shoreline.  It includes mountain peaks towering over 15,000 feet (almost 3 miles, or 4.6 km), and currently seven active glaciers.  These are tidewater glaciers, meaning these huge rivers of compacted snow and ice flow down to the shoreline, where the ice periodically breaks off (calves) to creating small icebergs floating out to the ocean.

 

We arrived in the morning, when the bay and its islands were covered in fog and mist.  It looked like the dawn of the world, somehow, mysterious half-seen mountains rising behind the islands, and broken bits of ice floating in the water.  The colors were almost leached out, making a world of greys with a hint of blue.  Definitely other-worldly, as if the ghosts of the bay were still living here.

 

Flocks of birds flew by, white gulls or terns, dark geese.  We slowly sailed on, barely leaving a wake, watching the water turn from grey to an icy glacier blue.  Icy white waterfalls cascaded down the hills and mountains, and we were close enough to hear the thundering waters!

 

We passed three or four glaciers, two that had the usual layers of white snow and grey rubble, looking like the striations of rock and sediments, indicating changing climate, weather, even volcanic activity.  

 

And then we arrived at Margerie Glacier, a pristine white glacier that somehow looks like a brand new baby glacier.  She isn’t, of course, but somehow she doesn’t have much of the usual debris layered in with her compacted snow and ice.  And yes, the park ranger referred to Margerie Glacier as a she – she was named for French geologist and geographer Emmanuel de Margerie, but to English speakers, the name sounds like Marjory, so people just refer to this glacier as female.  Margerie Glacier is about 21 miles long (34 km), and is one of the most photographed places in all of Alaska.  She also is one of the northernmost glaciers in Glacier Bay, being barely a mile or just over a kilometer from the Canadian border.  We could see the glacier winding back like a long flowing river, up into the foothills and presumably up into the mountains beyond.

 

The Margerie Glacier flows in from the west, and just east of where she reaches the bay is the Grand Pacific Glacier.  He actually originates in the Elias Mountains of Canada, and flows into Alaska, reaching the bay.  The Grand Pacific Glacier is so encrusted with rocky debris from landslides and also picked up as the glacier slides along, the exterior is almost black.  In fact, that exterior layer helps insulate the ice, slowing the melting and creating a thicker ice mass! 

 

Margerie and Grand Pacific are so close, they appear to touch.  I don’t know if they really do, but from our viewpoint it looked like they might.

 

Our ship stayed in place for a while, as we all stood on the decks or balconies, amazed by these marvels of nature and history.  How often do we get to see relics of the Great Ice Age, or even the Little Ice Age?  In fact, given the current climate change, many of the glaciers in the mountainous regions of North America are beginning to melt and disappear.  These glaciers of Glacier Bay may eventually be the only glaciers left in the northern hemisphere.

 

After a while, the captain turned the ship so people could have a view from the starboard side of the ship.  We stayed so long, we had a great of the two glaciers from the dining room at lunch.  (Other than in Antarctica, I don’t think I’ve ever had lunch while gazing at a glacier or two!)

 

We had to stay to our schedule, which meant leaving the north end of Glacier Bay and heading south.  The day brightened up a bit, though it never did clear up nor did the sun ever come out.  But the scenery was still mystical, mountains and islands veiled in mist and fog.

 

 

 

Sometimes humpback whales or seals can be seen in the bay, but we didn’t see any.  We saw something that may have been a sea otter, or possibly a young seal or sea lion.  It was just a glimpse of a small dark animal playing in the water.  It must have been freezing cold in that water, but, well, some animals have adapted to those conditions.

 

We headed south to Icy Strait Point, a tiny community across the strait from the town of Hoonah.  Hoonah is the largest Tlingit community in Alaska, and Icy Strait Point is also Tlingit.  We spent the evening there, mostly so people could take an excursion and see some of the wildlife.  I had dinner with a couple who were going out riding ATVs, looking for bears.  I signed up for a less adventurous excursion, going out on a whale watching trip.  

 

Our group filled pretty much filled up this boat, and we headed out to Cross Sound and the open ocean, despite the mist that turned into rain.  We saw humpback whales, mostly sighting their telltale spouts of mist as they breathed out through their blowholes.  Some would dive a bit, showing their backs and that small dorsal fin that gave them their name.

 

We went a bit further out to sea, and finally some whales decided to give us a more impressive show – one or two would lift up what seemed like the lower half of its body, and then slam that giant tail onto the surface of the ocean!  Huge splashes, over and over!  Our guide said that humpbacks do this to stun the small fish they eat.  It really was an amazing sight, that huge tail and body rising out of the water and slamming down, over and over again!

 

Of course, we all oohed and aahed, and tried to get photos.  I managed to get several photos of the waves just after the whales finished, but I did get a few spouts lingering against the islands in the distance.  Hard to see in the photos, but they were really exciting to see when we were right there!!!  (If you look really closely, you can see the spouts, just faint white-ish splotches against the dark islands beyond.)

 

The rain got heavier as it approached 9 PM, and the sun was setting behind the thick clouds.  Our boat, a catamaran really, headed back to the port so we could reboard our ship.  I was chilly, despite my many layers of clothing, but the tea and coffee area was open so I could warm up. 

 

Whales and glaciers – what an exciting day!