Glacier Bay, Alaska
For most of us our day ended with an exciting evening sighting of a cow moose with her two husky calves. We had spent a spectacular day in a treasure of a National Park, inching our way north in a broad and deep fjord, toward some of the few remaining tidewater glaciers of this wilderness state. We basked in blue skies, warm sun, calm air and flat seas…a reality totally unlike the image that most of us brought with us as we arrived in Alaska a few days earlier. Any rain for this rich, temperate rainforest appears to be far into the future.
Glacier Bay is the jewel of what is now the world’s second largest contiguous wilderness reserve, second only to the continent of Antarctica. Adjoining the park are the Glacier Bay National Reserve, Wrangell Saint Elias National Park, Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park (British Columbia) and Kluane National Park (Yukon Territory). It is a tribute to international diplomacy that this huge and scenic landscape will remain as wilderness that people from around the world can enjoy forever.
Our morning began with sightings of colonially-nesting seabirds (including everyone’s favorites, tufted and horned puffins), roaring northern sea lions, hungry brown bears and enigmatic mountain goats. Some of the latter were almost too high in the alpine slopes to see; others were not far above the tide line. Our slow and tortuous route though floating ice took us close to the impressive Johns Hopkins Glacier, one of those few rivers of ice still not succumbing to global climate change. In fact, it appears to be advancing slowly, while others nearby retreat. The echoing thunder of tons of ancient ice “calving” from its face into silt-laden water reached our ears well after the calving occurred.
Life abounds in these cold, aquamarine waters. A small sample of planktonic organisms, the building blocks of any marine community, was shown live on our video microscope. Diversity begins at the microscopic level.
And the moose? They fed casually beside and within a small, forest pond as we enjoyed a post-dinner walk. Their size is impressive, perhaps an appropriate symbol of the grandeur of Alaska.
