Glacier Bay National Park
Early morning with a promise of sunshine, whales, puffins and glaciers in the offing. We entered Glacier Bay National Park and Monument before sunrise, picked up Park Service Ranger Kerry at Bartlett Cove, and headed north through the narrows into Glacier Bay itself. Just after breakfast we passed slowly by South Marble Island, a rocky refuge that offers nesting habitat to over a half-dozen species of seabirds, among them the endearing tufted puffin. Digging their burrows beneath the roots of red elderberry shrubs, there they raise their young sheltered from the predations of the glaucous-winged gull, a larger, more powerful and always hungry neighbor on the island. As if it had forgotten just where its burrow is exactly, a puffin returning from a feeding trip frequently orbits the area in front of its home several times before landing, allowing for a chance to capture on film this picture illustrating its diagnostic bright orange bill, white face and black body. Much later and much further up bay, the sunshine still accompanied us, illuminating one beautiful scene after another.
An unnamed glacier carves a winding path down from a jagged range of mountains and then buries its snout in massive amounts of rocky debris it has pushed in front of it—the glacier’s terminal moraine. When the glacier, constrained by its budget of snow accumulation and melting, can push no further, then gravity conspires with water to continue the movement of the rock, silt, gravel and sand that make up the moraine. Huge amounts of melt water flow from the glacier during the warmest part of the day, then turn to a trickle in the cool evening. Over the last hundred years this varying volume of flow has continually transported and dropped, transported and dropped, sediments of all sizes in a broad glacial outwash plain. The area of active deposition remains clear while older channels fill in with scrubby willow and alder trees.
