We Visit the Ice Age

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September 11, 2007 - From Donna: Here we are, in our room, rocking out to the rhythm of the waves. Diane has taken a couple of meclazine so she doesn’t get seasick tonight. If we’re dining at the elite Pinnacle Grill, then we want her in the best of health.

The glaciers today were simply stunning. At first, we approached what we thought was the Hubbard Glacier, but the National Parks Service people on board said no, that was the Turner Glacier, not as impressive as the one at our destination about 30 minutes ahead. We couldn’t imagine anything looking better than this – a massive wall if ice shedding chunks that floated all around us. Some were striated, with stripes of sediment alternating with white or gray layers of ice. Others were just black from rock and dirt. Still others were white – pure snow and ice.

Eventually we chugged through a narrow opening into a bay, where monstrous sheets of ice were coming down from saw-tooth mountain tops, flowing ever so slowly into the tidal water. We stopped our engines close to the glacier edge and watched as “calves” of ice fell from the face of the glacier and landed with a huge splash into the frigid water. The air was filled with the familiar crack-and-roll of thunder – but it wasn’t thunder at all. It was the sound of ice moving down the valleys toward the Bay of Alaska. It boomed and ricocheted again and again even while we could see no actual movement except for the occasional chunk of ice floe coming off the forward wall. Huge rafts of ice floated around us, embedded with thousands of years’ worth of mud and rock, pulled down from the mountain tops and finally ending up in the sea, where it would melt and flow away to some other part of the world.

Although we’d spent more than an hour watching nature’s spectacle, we were disappointed to turn and sail out of the bay again, past a long chain of mountains cloaked entirely in ice and snow. The colors are difficult to describe – water that’s alternately blue, then khaki, then olive, then gray, then brown with silt. Above it, the mountains are either a shade of green that almost becomes black, or they’re white and ice blue, almost pastel in delicacy while displaying a harshness of frigid temperatures and unlivable slopes.

The Hubbard Glacier itself is more than 70 miles long, its long finger stretching down from the mountains as a frozen river. The face is only about six miles wide, moving a fraction of an inch at a time. Even so, this massive wonder has retreated several miles from where it once reached. We were sailing on a bay that used to be solid ice only 200 years ago. It’s funny because I remember being in fourth grade and seeing a photo in my geography book of a Canadian Mountie standing at the edge of a glacier. It was fascinating to me because, at the time, I’d thought glaciers were extinct – that they were a phenomenon limited only to the Ice Age. And now, here we are, witnessing them in person.

We have taken many, many photos, but have not been able to post them because it’s such a huge expense to access the Internet while on board. So I’ve had to limit my time to uploading text only, while saving the photos for later. I’ve also tried to download my email, but that, too, is a challenge because I have been receiving large files that take up a lot of download time. Even going directly to Yahoo has been impossible because I can’t seem to get access that way. In any case, the photos will come later. For now, it’s just a quick hop on and offline so I can at least get these posts uploaded.

Okay, more later. We pull into Sitka in the morning, which means more souvenir hunting. Maybe I’ll find a free Internet connection somewhere.