The Sister-In-Law Cruise Event - Day 4

27 August 2024 – Day 4 – Glacier Bay and Icy Strait Point

 

On Day 4 we sailed up Glacier Bay, a huge waterway stretching up through the islands and mainland of SE Alaska.  Glacier Bay is full of twisting inlets and bays branching off the huge main bay, and is all national park.  No houses, no buildings.  Just water, ice, mountains, and the animals that live here.

 

We cruised up several of the inlets so we could see some of the more impressive glaciers.  Margerie Glacier, in Tarr Inlet, is probably the most beautiful – it has very little moraine mixed in with the ice, moraine being all the rocks and gravel and stuff that gets churned up into a glacier as it moves across the landscape.  Margerie is bright white with blue glowing through the center, truly a pristine glacier!

 

We had all kinds of excitement as we stood on the bow of the ship and watched the glacier.  Some of the early viewers saw a pack of six to eight wolves climbing around on one side of the inlet.  (I wasn’t one of those early people.)  Others saw groups of baby sea otters, though I did hear them chirping and yipping as they swam by.  We saw groups of adolescent (or possibly younger) seals on an ice floe, sleeping young seals as they floated along.  And at least one young sea otter, also slumbering on an ice floe.

 

There were all sorts of birds, mostly a small white gull with a black bar almost at the end of their wings.  I looked for puffins, but didn’t see any.  However, I did see a huge brown and gold raptor kind of bird soar across the water in front of our bow, a HUGE bird!  I’m talking multiple times the size of the gulls!  At first I thought maybe it was a golden eagle, it had that kind of shape and size and coloring.  However, I spoke with the national park ranger who came on board to talk with us about the glaciers, and she said it would be very unusual to see a golden eagle in Alaska.  Our best guess is that this was most likely a young bald eagle, as in a juvenile – they’re dark brown with some mottled golden brown until they’re a few years old, and then they begin to develop the signature white head and tail feathers.  So that was exciting, seeing a juvenile bald eagle!

 

Other big excitement – we saw and heard Margerie Glacier calving!  When chunks break off a glacier, it’s called calving, just like when a chunk of ice breaks off an iceberg and it turns into a smaller ice floe.  The first calving, there was a sound like a giant crack of thunder – BOOM!  We all looked, some in time to see the chunk of ice fall into the water and create a mini tsunami, with waves rolling back and forth.  But then there were numerous smaller calvings, some almost most like a shower of powdered glacier raining down along the face of the glacier!  I actually caught some of that on my camera, although I have to say it looks more like just a blur of white powder.  Still, very exciting!  And more mini tsunamis after each one, marking the displaced water!

 

We also saw Johns Hopkins Glacier, Lamplugh Glacier, and other random glaciers in Johns Hopkins Inlet.  One of these was super dark around the edges with a thin layer of white in the center – that’s a perfect example of moraine, the rocky debris that gets accumulated around the sides of some glaciers as they slowly slowly slide across the land.

           

We saw a whale during lunch – just a few spouts as it exhaled, and glimpses of the back as it dove.  Probably a humpback, always a thrill!  So of course everyone spent half the afternoon looking for more whales!