Glacier Bay

September 7, 2018

We left Skagway last night at 2100 and sailed north.

This morning at 0600 we picked up the park rangers and naturalists and passed through Icy Strait into Glacier Bay.

When I was working on a purse seiner in 1962 we sometimes fished in Icy Strait. At that time there were pieces of ice in the strait. Today we sailed about 50 miles up Glacier Bay before we saw ice in the water.

We saw this Orca about halfway up the Bay in ice-free water

When we arrived at the head of the bay, I was shocked to see how the glaciers had receded since we were last here about ten years ago. The Grand Pacific Glacier right at the head of the bay had been dark with dirt and rock overburden but had a white ice face. Today it looked like mounds of dirt and rock with only a very few cracks where ice was visible.

The Margerie Glacier, the publicity star of Glacier Bay, is stalled and melting on the right. There is a small rock island visible center right and only the left side appears to be moving and calving. Another big change in only ten years.

If you enlarge the above photo, you can see the splash on the left side where I was rewarded for standing with my camera ready until a small chunk of ice broke off and fell just as I clicked.

On the way out, we turned up into Johns Hopkins Inlet and enjoyed some close views of the glaciers there. Our captain says cruise ships aren't allowed up this inlet until after September 1st so we were the fist HAL ship to go in there this year.

We'll be sailing across the Gulf of Alaska tonight and tomorrow, landing in Seward early Sunday morning. Tonight we enjoy a good dinner and a solid night's sleep on an unusually calm Gulf of Alaska.