Glacier Bay National Park
While the lower forty-eight roasted and sweated at high temperatures, we had lovely cool weather in Glacier Bay National Park. Under an overcast sky and already far into this 60-mile-long bay, we saw the first light of the day. Barely 200 years ago this magnificent fjord could not be discovered or contemplated by Captain George Vancouver as he explored what was to become Alaska. It was completely closed by a mass of ice 4000 feet high. Johns Hopkins Glacier let us see the dynamics of moving ice, differential erosion on rock by other rocks embedded in moving ice, and hundreds of harbor seals lolling on ice flows. The enormous face of this glacier, marbled with innumerable medial and lateral moraines helped us to understand the origins of moving mass. Johns Hopkins is connected on its right side to Gillman Glacier. Both flow at about the same rate. At their own pace, towers and avalanches of ice broke away from the face and cannonaded with a tremendous concussion (called “sumdum” or white thunder by the natives) into the water. The resulting wave action rocked our ship.
After breakfast we slowly began our retreat, passing the blue Lamplugh Glacier, navigating the narrow Russell Cut and heading south for visits to different bays and coves in search of the diverse wildlife. Eagles stood as sentinels. Many seabirds, such as pelagic cormorants, pigeon guillemots and black-legged kittiwakes were recorded. And one of the naturalists forfeited his dessert in a bet to the person who saw the first brown bear on the beach. They often search for intertidal food under rocks. Brown bears, called grizzly bears in the interior of Alaska, Canada and the Lower 48, are coastal animals, larger than their interior counterparts. With access to salmon, they have an incredible food resource in summer and fall. The salmon create the great difference in size between the two forms.
The next focus was South Marble Island, where a huge number of male Steller’s sea lions haul-out, and great breeding colonies of kittiwakes, glaucous-winged gulls, tufted puffins, pelagic cormorants, black oystercatchers, common murres and even a few horned puffins challenged our identification skills. The powerful odor of the sea lions assailed us, but the observation of such a bounty of different species kept us on deck.
A few miles south we ran into a huge raft of sea otters in an extensive kelp bed. These fluffy, middle-sized animals are a pleasure to watch. They float at the surface on their backs, with their head and feet out of the water, and depend on their incredibly rich fur (up to one million fine hairs per square inch on their throats) to fend off the cold of the water. And, yes! To manage such a physiological feat, their metabolic rate is very high. They eat an incredible amount of crabs, mussels, clams and sea urchins.
By evening we had reached the headquarters of the park and Glacier Bay Lodge, where a lovely nature center educated us further, and we hiked a short trail in the forest or briskly along the road to Gustavus. A young porcupine and little brown bats were our final wildlife sightings of the day.
While the lower forty-eight roasted and sweated at high temperatures, we had lovely cool weather in Glacier Bay National Park. Under an overcast sky and already far into this 60-mile-long bay, we saw the first light of the day. Barely 200 years ago this magnificent fjord could not be discovered or contemplated by Captain George Vancouver as he explored what was to become Alaska. It was completely closed by a mass of ice 4000 feet high. Johns Hopkins Glacier let us see the dynamics of moving ice, differential erosion on rock by other rocks embedded in moving ice, and hundreds of harbor seals lolling on ice flows. The enormous face of this glacier, marbled with innumerable medial and lateral moraines helped us to understand the origins of moving mass. Johns Hopkins is connected on its right side to Gillman Glacier. Both flow at about the same rate. At their own pace, towers and avalanches of ice broke away from the face and cannonaded with a tremendous concussion (called “sumdum” or white thunder by the natives) into the water. The resulting wave action rocked our ship.
After breakfast we slowly began our retreat, passing the blue Lamplugh Glacier, navigating the narrow Russell Cut and heading south for visits to different bays and coves in search of the diverse wildlife. Eagles stood as sentinels. Many seabirds, such as pelagic cormorants, pigeon guillemots and black-legged kittiwakes were recorded. And one of the naturalists forfeited his dessert in a bet to the person who saw the first brown bear on the beach. They often search for intertidal food under rocks. Brown bears, called grizzly bears in the interior of Alaska, Canada and the Lower 48, are coastal animals, larger than their interior counterparts. With access to salmon, they have an incredible food resource in summer and fall. The salmon create the great difference in size between the two forms.
The next focus was South Marble Island, where a huge number of male Steller’s sea lions haul-out, and great breeding colonies of kittiwakes, glaucous-winged gulls, tufted puffins, pelagic cormorants, black oystercatchers, common murres and even a few horned puffins challenged our identification skills. The powerful odor of the sea lions assailed us, but the observation of such a bounty of different species kept us on deck.
A few miles south we ran into a huge raft of sea otters in an extensive kelp bed. These fluffy, middle-sized animals are a pleasure to watch. They float at the surface on their backs, with their head and feet out of the water, and depend on their incredibly rich fur (up to one million fine hairs per square inch on their throats) to fend off the cold of the water. And, yes! To manage such a physiological feat, their metabolic rate is very high. They eat an incredible amount of crabs, mussels, clams and sea urchins.
By evening we had reached the headquarters of the park and Glacier Bay Lodge, where a lovely nature center educated us further, and we hiked a short trail in the forest or briskly along the road to Gustavus. A young porcupine and little brown bats were our final wildlife sightings of the day.
