Chatham Strait, Hood Bay, Red Bluff Bay
After sailing southeast all night from Bartlett Cove at the mouth of Glacier Bay, we woke up in Chatham Strait with the glaciated, rugged mountain range of Chichagof and northern Baranof Islands to the west and the subdued, heavily forested country of Admiralty Island to the east. Both are part of the Alexander Terrain, a fragment of continental crust formed 500–250 million years ago and attached to the North American continent approximately 150 million years ago.
Almost all of Admiralty Island is a National Monument, created primarily to protect SE Alaska’s densest population of brown bears. After breakfast we cruised into Hood Bay, quickly finding a brown bear sow with two cubs on the beach. In the lounge, Linda Burback instructed us on how to be creative with all our photos, and Berit Solstad introduced us to the details of the world of humpback whales.
We left Hood Bay and sailed across Chatham Strait, formed by glacial erosion along a strikingly linear major fault that extends from the southern tip of Baranof Island NNE up Lynn Canal to Skagway and then NW, becoming the Denali Fault in south-central Alaska. The windless conditions produced glassy water, ideal for whale watching. We were treated to a spectacular sighting of a solitary humpback, surfacing and blowing just off the National Geographic Sea Bird’s bow.
As we sailed south along Chatham Strait, we sighted a cascade of water tumbling over 35-million-year-old granite at Waterfall Cove on Baranof Island. Warm sunshine and calm wind and seas brought us onto the decks to see the spectacular snow-covered peaks of Baranof Island, rising on our right up to 4,500 feet above sea level. Dall’s porpoises darted around the Sea Bird.
The afternoon took us to Red Bluff Bay, on the east coast of Baranof Island. Red Bluff is an ultramafic intrusion formed at 2000° Fahrenheit at a depth of 30 miles and then squirted up into 800°F metamorphic rocks, all this happening nearly 200 million years ago. Red Bluff’s sparse vegetation is due to its high content of elements inhospitable to plants. After rounding the bluff, we passed into a spectacular 3-mile-long glacial fjord with waterfalls tumbling down from the snowfields thousands of feet above. At the head of this natural cathedral, we sighted several brown bears and had close sightings of Barrow’s golden eyes, harlequin ducks, red-throated loons, Canada geese, and mew gulls. It was hard to realize that, 25,000 years ago, this forested valley was filled to a depth of ~2,000 feet with glacial ice!
After sailing southeast all night from Bartlett Cove at the mouth of Glacier Bay, we woke up in Chatham Strait with the glaciated, rugged mountain range of Chichagof and northern Baranof Islands to the west and the subdued, heavily forested country of Admiralty Island to the east. Both are part of the Alexander Terrain, a fragment of continental crust formed 500–250 million years ago and attached to the North American continent approximately 150 million years ago.
Almost all of Admiralty Island is a National Monument, created primarily to protect SE Alaska’s densest population of brown bears. After breakfast we cruised into Hood Bay, quickly finding a brown bear sow with two cubs on the beach. In the lounge, Linda Burback instructed us on how to be creative with all our photos, and Berit Solstad introduced us to the details of the world of humpback whales.
We left Hood Bay and sailed across Chatham Strait, formed by glacial erosion along a strikingly linear major fault that extends from the southern tip of Baranof Island NNE up Lynn Canal to Skagway and then NW, becoming the Denali Fault in south-central Alaska. The windless conditions produced glassy water, ideal for whale watching. We were treated to a spectacular sighting of a solitary humpback, surfacing and blowing just off the National Geographic Sea Bird’s bow.
As we sailed south along Chatham Strait, we sighted a cascade of water tumbling over 35-million-year-old granite at Waterfall Cove on Baranof Island. Warm sunshine and calm wind and seas brought us onto the decks to see the spectacular snow-covered peaks of Baranof Island, rising on our right up to 4,500 feet above sea level. Dall’s porpoises darted around the Sea Bird.
The afternoon took us to Red Bluff Bay, on the east coast of Baranof Island. Red Bluff is an ultramafic intrusion formed at 2000° Fahrenheit at a depth of 30 miles and then squirted up into 800°F metamorphic rocks, all this happening nearly 200 million years ago. Red Bluff’s sparse vegetation is due to its high content of elements inhospitable to plants. After rounding the bluff, we passed into a spectacular 3-mile-long glacial fjord with waterfalls tumbling down from the snowfields thousands of feet above. At the head of this natural cathedral, we sighted several brown bears and had close sightings of Barrow’s golden eyes, harlequin ducks, red-throated loons, Canada geese, and mew gulls. It was hard to realize that, 25,000 years ago, this forested valley was filled to a depth of ~2,000 feet with glacial ice!
