Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska
A National Park ranger, Randy, and a Tlingit cultural interpreter, Bertha, joined our extensive staff of naturalists, photographers and other experts to share their knowledge of the vast complex of fjords and mountains that comprises Glacier Bay National Park, famous for glaciers and wildlife galore.
At South Marble Island we were treated to furiously flapping tufted puffins and loud, gregarious Steller sea lions piled atop rocks . . . and each other! Moving up-bay, we spied several mountain goat nannies on precipitous slopes, each with a day’s-old kid sticking close to her side. One adult goat had sadly met its end, a white woolly carcass with exposed ribcage being scavenged by a succession of adult and immature bald eagles and ravens. No one could say precisely why this mountain goat had died, but older goats do eventually lose their sharp eyesight so perhaps it had miss-stepped—with fatal consequences.
Glacier Bay turned out to be our best brown bear day yet! Eagle-eyed naturalists picked out two separate brown bears, one foraging on the hillside, the other patrolling the beach at low tide. One was reddish-brown with a lovely coat, and the other was brown but for a light-reddish patch across the shoulders. Each bear was highly individual in its appearance; no two are precisely alike. Later we encountered two adult bears traveling in close company, likely a courting male and female who will keep company for only a week or so.
Our bear encounters were lengthy enough to allow appreciation of their stunning surroundings including some newly blooming lupine flowers, melting snow drifts, budding cottonwood leaves and even a flock of greater scaup ducks pausing in this beautiful bay en route to nesting sights further north.
Bald eagles like to perch on icebergs and we were treated to this sight several times including a “double eagle.” One was even perched atop a glacial pinnacle, or serac, of the Margerie Glacier. Bald eagles prefer to nest in trees when available but close to the glaciers a bald eagle pair had nested right on the ground, a mass of sticks situated on a narrow ledge with the telltale white head of the incubating parent barely visible. This seemed risky but the eagle pair has been nesting here successfully for four years.
It had been four days since our last glacial fix in Endicott Arm, so everyone was excited to be among tidewater glaciers once more. The black mass of Grand Pacific Glacier is a peculiar sight, but our naturalists and Glacier Bay hosts patiently explained the spectacle. Glaciers are a combination of ice, snow, meltwater (in summer) and rock of various sizes, but this glacier carried an unusually heavy rock load.
More comprehensible was the blue-and-white Margerie Glacier, a tidewater glacier which calves icebergs into the sea. All hands were on deck eager to experience this phenomenon known to Tlingit people as “white thunder”— and we were not disappointed. After a short period of quiescence the glacier “woke up” and let loose its accumulated stress in a spasm of crowd-pleasing calving.
