Williams Cove & Tracy Arm
A sunny dawn led us into Williams Cove and its unforgettable post-coital redolence of barnacles and muscles and kelp exposed to drying air. As the day warmed into an overcast of intermittent yet pleasant drizzle, some of us strolled along well-trodden bear paths, rife with buttercups, star flower, and chocolate lilies. While waving away the errant no seeums, we found sign of the ursine trailbreakers: raked-off blueberries, pawed-up roots, and nipped sedges.
By now, day six, we had learned about the sensory payoffs that show the richness of southeastern Alaska. Whether turning our binoculars upside down to magnify the intricate fragility of bog orchids, munching on glacier ice while paddling our kayaks in Williams Cove, watching a golden eye hen with duckling, or dipping a hand overboard to feel the cold in which northern sea mammals thrive.
After a round of Zodiac driving lessons for some of the youngest passengers, the Sea Bird “pulled the hook” and rode the flooding tide up into Tracy Arm. More than a century ago, John Muir wrote about this place, as “shut in by sublime Yosemite cliffs, nobly sculptured, and adorned with waterfalls and fringes of trees, bushes, and patches of flowers; but amid so crowded a display of novel beauty it was not easy to concentrate the attention long enough on any portion of it without giving more days and years than our lives could afford.”
Indeed, fresh water—the life blood of this cornucopia—wove like abundant silver threads, lacing the landscape into a tapestry of green, splashing, and thunderous beauty.
Finally, back in Zodiacs, we bumped and turned and slipped our way through the floating, blue detritus of South Sawyer Glacier. The ice field seemed alive and impossibly blue, coiled into the sky above us. Hundreds of harbor seals, accompanying recently weaned pups, lay on flat ice pans. The rapid retreat of ice here had recently unveiled vast expanses of pale cliff never before exposed to air. Then, as we sat silently as churchgoers in the cathedral, the glacier exploded into action: firing great pillars of ice into the ocean as a climactic crescendo to the last week’s passage.
A sunny dawn led us into Williams Cove and its unforgettable post-coital redolence of barnacles and muscles and kelp exposed to drying air. As the day warmed into an overcast of intermittent yet pleasant drizzle, some of us strolled along well-trodden bear paths, rife with buttercups, star flower, and chocolate lilies. While waving away the errant no seeums, we found sign of the ursine trailbreakers: raked-off blueberries, pawed-up roots, and nipped sedges.
By now, day six, we had learned about the sensory payoffs that show the richness of southeastern Alaska. Whether turning our binoculars upside down to magnify the intricate fragility of bog orchids, munching on glacier ice while paddling our kayaks in Williams Cove, watching a golden eye hen with duckling, or dipping a hand overboard to feel the cold in which northern sea mammals thrive.
After a round of Zodiac driving lessons for some of the youngest passengers, the Sea Bird “pulled the hook” and rode the flooding tide up into Tracy Arm. More than a century ago, John Muir wrote about this place, as “shut in by sublime Yosemite cliffs, nobly sculptured, and adorned with waterfalls and fringes of trees, bushes, and patches of flowers; but amid so crowded a display of novel beauty it was not easy to concentrate the attention long enough on any portion of it without giving more days and years than our lives could afford.”
Indeed, fresh water—the life blood of this cornucopia—wove like abundant silver threads, lacing the landscape into a tapestry of green, splashing, and thunderous beauty.
Finally, back in Zodiacs, we bumped and turned and slipped our way through the floating, blue detritus of South Sawyer Glacier. The ice field seemed alive and impossibly blue, coiled into the sky above us. Hundreds of harbor seals, accompanying recently weaned pups, lay on flat ice pans. The rapid retreat of ice here had recently unveiled vast expanses of pale cliff never before exposed to air. Then, as we sat silently as churchgoers in the cathedral, the glacier exploded into action: firing great pillars of ice into the ocean as a climactic crescendo to the last week’s passage.
