Endicott Arm: Ford’s Terror & Dawes Glacier
Glaciers are beautiful sculptors, and they have created masterpieces in these rocks. How many years did it take to create the magnificent domes and hanging valleys of Ford’s Terror? I’ve seen this landscape many times, but I’m still speechless when it’s in front of me. I feel so small, and the giant rock forms around me are so perfect.
We just finished Zodiac tours in Ford’s Terror, a side inlet which branches off of the 34-mile long fjord named Endicott Arm. The landscape is overwhelming and otherworldly. The curving rock mountains and U-shaped valleys were all carved by glaciers, which smoothed out and polished steep fjord walls and mountaintops.
John Horn, a U.S. Forest Service Wilderness Ranger, paddled nearly ten miles in his kayak to meet our ship. We welcomed him aboard the National Geographic Sea Bird, and he spoke to us about the Forest Service’s role in preserving this piece of wild America.
Late in the afternoon, we approached the end of Endicott Arm, and about two miles from the face of Dawes Glacier we could go no further. Hundreds of seals were resting on the ‘bergy bits,’ (small icebergs.) It is their birthing time, so we kept our distance from newborn seals and pregnant females. Some of the large, flat pieces of ice were crowded with twenty or more seals! When a seal is born here, it gets a cool reception: it is born on ice fallen from the glacier. Fortunately, blubber is a wonderful insulator.
We observed and admired the seals, and we looked at uninhabited ice chunks, and imagined them as animals: “That one looks like a bear, and over there is a swan.” At the fjord’s end stood Dawes Glacier, nearly a mile wide and 20 stories high at its front. Further away, where it flowed from the ice field, it looked like a bumpy, white, mountain road with dirty tire tracks on it. Side glaciers had left trails of debris in the center, where paths of ice had merged. Jade green water and blue-white ice chunks were surrounded by steep rock cliffs, stubborn green vegetation, and thread-like waterfalls.
In the midst of this graceful work of earth art, I feel small and humbled.
