Glacier Bay National Park
Today we went time traveling in Glacier Bay. Just after breakfast we arrived at the northern end of the great fiord, where the Grand Pacific and Marjorie Glaciers flow down to the sea. These two tremendous rivers of ice are utterly different from one another. The Marjorie is sparkling white and its surface, riven with crevasses and rugged with towering seracs, is crenellated like the ramparts of a fairy castle. By contrast the Grand Pacific is covered with black rock rubble, like a glacier from the dark side, and its surface is relatively smooth and rounded.
Together, the glaciers define an environment of ice and bare rock. This is the post-glacial world, just emerging from long entombment beneath trillions of tons of ice. Just 200 years ago, when the Grand Pacific Glacier began its rapid, 65-mile retreat to its current position at the head of the bay, the land around the mouth of Glacier Bay was in this same condition. 18,000 years before that, all of Southeast Alaska and much of the rest of North America was emerging from beneath continental ice sheets in much the same way.
When the land is freed from the grinding weight of the ice, forest succession begins. Beginning with lichens and mosses, followed by small flowers like Dryas and native grasses, plants arrive one by one, usually carried on the wind, growing and dying and slowly building soil that supports a more and more diverse community. After some years there is enough soil for the first trees, Sitka alders, then willows and spruces to take hold and a new forest is born.
Cruising down the length of the bay today, stopping along the way to watch a bear feeding in the intertidal and mountain goats resting on high ledges, we also watched the forests rise up around us as we drew away further and further from the glaciers. By the time we reached the park headquarters at Bartlett Cove, where we went ashore for walks in the spruce forest after dinner, we had compressed 200 years of forest development into a single day.
Glacier Bay is a crown jewel in our National Park system, and its qualities as a time machine make it renowned among glaciologists and forest ecologists around the world. Most evident of all during our day here was its broad palette of scenic beauty, one lovely scene succeeding another through 65 miles of travel and 200 years of change.
