Great yoga class this morning (thank you Darcy!) – I woke up at about 6 and got my tea all ready, gloves on… all prepared to work out in the chilly morning… and then I took my shoes off for yoga. Meh.
Before breakfast, we had an otter spotting on the bow. Just floating along… We stopped this morning, probably right before I woke up, at the Glacier Bay visitor centre and picked up four guests. The first was John Pachuta and his daughter Jessie: he was the naturalist that we met on the trail at the Raptor Centre in Sitka. The next two were Brad, a park ranger, and Bertha, a Tlingit, who is a cultural specialist. Brad gave a short talk during breakfast about the kinds of birds that we might see in Glacier Bay: puffins, eagles, and gulls among them.
We had a great sighting of puffins this morning at South Marble Island: tufted AND horned puffins flying low along the water while sea lions lounged in the sun. A short time later, someone spotted three bears on the beach, but unfortunately, before most of us could get up to the bow, a whale breached in front of the bears and scared them back into the forest. That would have been crazy cool.
All morning and afternoon we sailed north into Glacier Bay. We stopped a few times to watch several wolves on a rocky beach: at least 4 adults wolves and 3 or 4 pups. They were all up moving around at various times and the pups were consistently playing with each other and climbing on the parents. All our naturalists say that this is unusual – that wolves aren’t usually in a pack this large, nor are they seen moving. Again, I call BS. [post trip note: I did ask multiple people, and it appears that we did actually have kind of an unusual trip]. At the same place that we wolf-watched, a lone bear came out from the woods, walked along the stream on the same side as the wolves, and disappeared back into the forest. How cool to be standing there watching wolves play, a bear meander past, and puffin flying between you and them. Wow.
A little while later, after the wolves lost our interest (but really – they didn’t), we slowed down once again to drift alongside a large brown bear shuffling along, picking up rocks and flipping them over, making his way slowly up the shore. From the telescope that Linda set up, it looked like he was mangy – maybe that he’d gotten the worse end of a fight – but David said that he was just losing his winter coat and that was why he looked icky.
We finally made it to our destination: the end of Glacier Bay and the mouth of the Margerie Glacier and the Great Pacific Glacier, which is kind of also in Canada. By midafternoon, the sun was out in full force and we all sat on the bow, drinking in the sunshine and Tuaca-laced cider while watching Margerie for any sign of calving.
Calving is when a glacier chunk falls into the water, sending up waves that rocked our boat even half a mile out. When I asked, Ranger Brad said that the glacier was probably around 7 stories high.
The water was a stunning turquoise blue – which got murkier as we inched closer to the glacier mouths – and the sun was sparkling off of it like a thousand shimmering diamonds. We finally got our calving wish – and I got some killer calving photos – as Margerie calved not once, but twice, sending huge pieces of ice into the sea below. On our way out of Glacier Bay, we took the opposite shoreline, sailing close to Lampugh and Reid glaciers. The view looking back toward the tip of the bay was surreal in the sunlight, and the Front Range looked “otterly” majestic (sorry, I couldn’t resist).
Post-dinner, we docked at Glacier Bay to spend a few hours hiking in the forest, relaxing in the visitor centre, and saying goodbye to our guests.