Glacier Bay National Park
Often as we awake in Glacier Bay National Park, the weather is a brooding drizzle that becomes drier and brighter as we move “up bay.” Eventually it did become brighter. Gloomy Knob, a dolomite blob on a geologic map, had a wet mountain goat standing against a sheer cliff. Tufted puffins floated in the water near the ship. Later, we cruised into Russell Cut and found two brown bears near a salmon stream. One was much larger than the other. The smaller one kept looking back at the larger one. Smaller brown bears can be killed by a massive older male, so the concern was well justified. The smaller bruin walked back and forth through the rushing stream. Jenni Burr, our National Park Service naturalist, saw the back of a pink salmon wiggle upstream. After standing for awhile in the swift current, the bear found a remnant piece of salmon to consume. In today’s photograph, glaucous-winged gulls patiently stood waiting for a morsel. This smaller bear walked into the alders, and soon the larger bear appeared again and ambled along the beach.
Accounts like this don’t have to be terribly complex to be important. For those that have a passion for viewing wildlife, these simple observations become pieces of a great puzzle. No one sees the entire life of an animal all at one time, not even the life of one of your own family members; you just get tidbits to arrange. It is deeply rewarding when those fragments begin to tell a story. The last stage is filling in the gaps and seeing what you’ve read about for years. The puzzle is never completed; the joy really comes in finding the pieces.
Johns Hopkins Inlet was bright and cheerful. Fat-faced harbor seals watched as we slowly wound our way through the ice to finally come to a stop. We were in the center of a remarkable amphitheater of broken ice pinnacles colored a cerulean blue. The glaciers lay in cradles of granite cut with dark segments of graywacke scraped from an ancient seafloor.
A flurry of activity filled the air around South Marble Island. Nesting kittiwakes and gulls, puffins and murres, guillemots and oystercatchers filled our ears with an unharmonious mixture of calls. Gray gull chicks stood around on the higher rocks with blank looking expressions. Small offshore rocks were crammed with brown Steller sea lions. They growled, pushed, and crawled over each other.
Later that evening we hiked in the forest around Bartlett Cove and quickly passed through the visitor center as twilight turned to night.
Often as we awake in Glacier Bay National Park, the weather is a brooding drizzle that becomes drier and brighter as we move “up bay.” Eventually it did become brighter. Gloomy Knob, a dolomite blob on a geologic map, had a wet mountain goat standing against a sheer cliff. Tufted puffins floated in the water near the ship. Later, we cruised into Russell Cut and found two brown bears near a salmon stream. One was much larger than the other. The smaller one kept looking back at the larger one. Smaller brown bears can be killed by a massive older male, so the concern was well justified. The smaller bruin walked back and forth through the rushing stream. Jenni Burr, our National Park Service naturalist, saw the back of a pink salmon wiggle upstream. After standing for awhile in the swift current, the bear found a remnant piece of salmon to consume. In today’s photograph, glaucous-winged gulls patiently stood waiting for a morsel. This smaller bear walked into the alders, and soon the larger bear appeared again and ambled along the beach.
Accounts like this don’t have to be terribly complex to be important. For those that have a passion for viewing wildlife, these simple observations become pieces of a great puzzle. No one sees the entire life of an animal all at one time, not even the life of one of your own family members; you just get tidbits to arrange. It is deeply rewarding when those fragments begin to tell a story. The last stage is filling in the gaps and seeing what you’ve read about for years. The puzzle is never completed; the joy really comes in finding the pieces.
Johns Hopkins Inlet was bright and cheerful. Fat-faced harbor seals watched as we slowly wound our way through the ice to finally come to a stop. We were in the center of a remarkable amphitheater of broken ice pinnacles colored a cerulean blue. The glaciers lay in cradles of granite cut with dark segments of graywacke scraped from an ancient seafloor.
A flurry of activity filled the air around South Marble Island. Nesting kittiwakes and gulls, puffins and murres, guillemots and oystercatchers filled our ears with an unharmonious mixture of calls. Gray gull chicks stood around on the higher rocks with blank looking expressions. Small offshore rocks were crammed with brown Steller sea lions. They growled, pushed, and crawled over each other.
Later that evening we hiked in the forest around Bartlett Cove and quickly passed through the visitor center as twilight turned to night.
