This jewel in our national park system is a place of change and movement. At dawn, we began to witness that movement with a bit of calving in front of the Margerie Glacier’s mile-wide icy face. As the morning progressed, we moved south past smooth bare rock and piles of moraine to areas partly covered with mosses and black cottonwood trees changing into autumn’s gold. Sitka alder shrubs with their life-giving nitrogen nodules clung to cracks and level spots along the rocky fiord walls, and soon dark green Sitka spruce spiked the horizon.
The scale of this place is vast, and capturing it in a photo is no easy task. Our photographers worked hard at making beautiful digital images and special memories, while we explored this changing wilderness landscape aboard our wonderful expedition vessel.
Movement, migration, and change are expressed in every aspect of this remarkable fiord. In times both ancient and quite recently, great sheets of glacial ice have moved up and down the bay to scour the land and scoop out the bay. In the Little Ice Age just 250 years ago, the Grand Pacific Glacier advanced sixty-five miles down the valleys to chase out the Tlinget inhabitants and wipe away their village sites.
The land and the animals here are moving toward fall on this calm reflective September day. Brilliant yellow leaves on the cottonwoods and the pale pink of fireweed seeds still clinging to their dark red stalks dot the hillsides. Large flocks of surf scoters are molting their feathers in preparation for a southward journey, and their wing beats as they lift off the water create an awesome sound. Juvenile black-legged kittiwakes are calling out their names and searching the sea for a meal. On Gloomy Knob, (a big chunk of dolomite) nearly a dozen mountain goats browsed on hillside twigs and leaves, and just around the corner, near a known salmon stream, a mother brown bear and her three cubs of the year intently filled their bellies with roots.
A stop at South Marble Island brought the sounds and smells and hauled out tawny bodies of Steller or Northern sea lions into view, and at last, tufted puffin in the air and in the water along with hundreds of other seabirds. And just as we were considering a relaxed cocktail or possibly a shower, the trump card of marine mammals hove into view…a big beautiful male killer whale. Most likely a transient, it gave us some close views of that infamous towering dorsal fin!
