Glacier Bay National Park
Guided by northern lights, we arrived in Glacier Bay at midnight and awoke at the far end of the bay to clear skies and brilliant sunshine. The sparkling blue ice of the Margerie glacier in golden rays of sunlight gave us an early glimpse of the day to come. Could our fantastic wildlife viewing in Chatham Strait the previous day be matched? We were in for a different treat this day: the sheer fjords of the bay, the booming sounds of the calving glaciers, a gourmet cook-out on deck with the towering Fairweather range as our mural and a diversity of life that we had not yet seen.
After breakfast, we glided through glassy water listening to floating ice chunks thud gently off of the hull. We marveled at the sides of the fjord that were carved out by glaciers thousands of feet high. As we came around Jaw Point and approached the Johns Hopkins tidewater glacier, its towering face gave us a spectacular show of apartment-sized chunks calving off and crashing to the sea. The resulting swells rocked the Sea Lion and the Jaw Point lived up to its name as our jaws dropped to the floor with awe and amazement. Wow – what a force of nature! It inspires me to think in ways I usually don’t – poetry:
The blue glacier calves
Sea Lion patiently waits
Sonic booms of ice
Glacier Bay brought us a day in the life of nature’s diversity. At one point we were watching a humpback whale lunge, sea otters feasting on clams near the bow, harbor porpoises circling the ship, puffins bobbing on the swells and hundreds of shore birds calling from the nearby islands. Dashing from rail to rail and bow to stern, we were in full appreciation of the majestic tapestry of life that Glacier Bay protects.
Guided by northern lights, we arrived in Glacier Bay at midnight and awoke at the far end of the bay to clear skies and brilliant sunshine. The sparkling blue ice of the Margerie glacier in golden rays of sunlight gave us an early glimpse of the day to come. Could our fantastic wildlife viewing in Chatham Strait the previous day be matched? We were in for a different treat this day: the sheer fjords of the bay, the booming sounds of the calving glaciers, a gourmet cook-out on deck with the towering Fairweather range as our mural and a diversity of life that we had not yet seen.
After breakfast, we glided through glassy water listening to floating ice chunks thud gently off of the hull. We marveled at the sides of the fjord that were carved out by glaciers thousands of feet high. As we came around Jaw Point and approached the Johns Hopkins tidewater glacier, its towering face gave us a spectacular show of apartment-sized chunks calving off and crashing to the sea. The resulting swells rocked the Sea Lion and the Jaw Point lived up to its name as our jaws dropped to the floor with awe and amazement. Wow – what a force of nature! It inspires me to think in ways I usually don’t – poetry:
The blue glacier calves
Sea Lion patiently waits
Sonic booms of ice
Glacier Bay brought us a day in the life of nature’s diversity. At one point we were watching a humpback whale lunge, sea otters feasting on clams near the bow, harbor porpoises circling the ship, puffins bobbing on the swells and hundreds of shore birds calling from the nearby islands. Dashing from rail to rail and bow to stern, we were in full appreciation of the majestic tapestry of life that Glacier Bay protects.
