Hot Ice! No words could better describe our morning meanderings amid the spectacular icebergs drifting in Le Conte Bay and beached on the tidal flats of the Stikine River estuary. The calm, clear skies and hot September sun were melting the ice rapidly, but icebergs almost the size of our ship can take weeks to disappear as they return to their primitive liquid state. The Le Conte Glacier, North America's most southerly tidewater glacier, is calving relentlessly.
Those who walked amid the ice on shore found wolf tracks, thousands of migrant gulls, waterfowl and shorebirds, and a few marine invertebrates stranded with the tide. Others explored in the Zodiacs and drifted quietly amid the ice - blue, powerful, dripping like rain showers, cracking, smiling back at us, and tempting us to approach. The power of gravity and tides is nowhere more apparent than near the glaciers of Alaska.
