Glacier Bay National Park
At 6:00 AM the Sea Lion departed from the recent sands and gravels of Bartlett Cove having boarded Adrianna Cahill, an Interpretive Ranger with Glacier Bay National Park. We began our 65-mile journey NW up Glacier Bay, a voyage impossible in 1794 when the bay was seen by Captain George Vancouver—then it was completely filled by 1000 feet of glacial ice!
Just after breakfast, we stopped at South Marble Island, composed of 400 million year old Willoughby Limestone, part of the Alexander Terrain. Here we observed Steller sea lions taking advantage of the smooth rounded rocks for a haul-out, while a myriad of birds perched, floating or flying, all ready to partake in a meal of plankton or fish in the nearby waters.
We continued along the east side of Glacier Bay to Gloomy Knob, limestone cliffs studded with creamy white mountain goats and their kids, some perching in unbelievably steep terrain. We watched one mother and her kid attempt a steep, rocky traverse only to decide that discretion was the better part of valor and retreat back to safer, grassy ground.
After passing Tlingit Point, we were treated to a protracted sighting of a gray wolf at the entrance to Tidal Inlet. Adrianna Cahill said that this was only the fourth time she had sighted a wolf in her 8 summers at Glacier Bay!
We then passed from Alexander Terrain sedimentary rocks into 65 million year granitic intrusions, where we were treated to another unusually close and long view of a huge Alaska brown bear ambling through the brush a few yards inland from the ocean water. Even larger mammals, humpback whales, were spotted as we continued to the head of Tarr Inlet, which ends at two tidal glaciers of very different aspects. Margerie glacier comes in from the northwest as a jagged white and blue mass with obvious dark lateral moraines on each side. The Grand Pacific Glacier, which comes in from the north through Canada, is almost completely covered with morainal material, nearly obscuring the glacial ice.
From both the head of Tarr Inlet and from its branch, Johns Hopkins Inlet, we looked west across the Tarr Inlet Suture Zone into the rugged, high, glacier-covered Fairweather Range, composed of intensely deformed 65-million-year metamorphic rocks of the Chugach Terrain. The relief between Johns Hopkins Inlet and the Fairweather Mountains is among the most extreme in the world, with nearly three miles of relief in fewer than 15 miles horizontally.
Progressing back down Glacier Bay towards Icy Strait, we passed from nearly bare rock through brushy slopes into heavily forested slopes of spruce and hemlock—mimicking the process of re-vegetation as the glaciers retreated over the past 250 years. A very special day was capped by Adrianna Cahill’s eloquent presentation of the paths taken by a molecule of water as it circulates and re-circulates through the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere of Glacier Bay.
At 6:00 AM the Sea Lion departed from the recent sands and gravels of Bartlett Cove having boarded Adrianna Cahill, an Interpretive Ranger with Glacier Bay National Park. We began our 65-mile journey NW up Glacier Bay, a voyage impossible in 1794 when the bay was seen by Captain George Vancouver—then it was completely filled by 1000 feet of glacial ice!
Just after breakfast, we stopped at South Marble Island, composed of 400 million year old Willoughby Limestone, part of the Alexander Terrain. Here we observed Steller sea lions taking advantage of the smooth rounded rocks for a haul-out, while a myriad of birds perched, floating or flying, all ready to partake in a meal of plankton or fish in the nearby waters.
We continued along the east side of Glacier Bay to Gloomy Knob, limestone cliffs studded with creamy white mountain goats and their kids, some perching in unbelievably steep terrain. We watched one mother and her kid attempt a steep, rocky traverse only to decide that discretion was the better part of valor and retreat back to safer, grassy ground.
After passing Tlingit Point, we were treated to a protracted sighting of a gray wolf at the entrance to Tidal Inlet. Adrianna Cahill said that this was only the fourth time she had sighted a wolf in her 8 summers at Glacier Bay!
We then passed from Alexander Terrain sedimentary rocks into 65 million year granitic intrusions, where we were treated to another unusually close and long view of a huge Alaska brown bear ambling through the brush a few yards inland from the ocean water. Even larger mammals, humpback whales, were spotted as we continued to the head of Tarr Inlet, which ends at two tidal glaciers of very different aspects. Margerie glacier comes in from the northwest as a jagged white and blue mass with obvious dark lateral moraines on each side. The Grand Pacific Glacier, which comes in from the north through Canada, is almost completely covered with morainal material, nearly obscuring the glacial ice.
From both the head of Tarr Inlet and from its branch, Johns Hopkins Inlet, we looked west across the Tarr Inlet Suture Zone into the rugged, high, glacier-covered Fairweather Range, composed of intensely deformed 65-million-year metamorphic rocks of the Chugach Terrain. The relief between Johns Hopkins Inlet and the Fairweather Mountains is among the most extreme in the world, with nearly three miles of relief in fewer than 15 miles horizontally.
Progressing back down Glacier Bay towards Icy Strait, we passed from nearly bare rock through brushy slopes into heavily forested slopes of spruce and hemlock—mimicking the process of re-vegetation as the glaciers retreated over the past 250 years. A very special day was capped by Adrianna Cahill’s eloquent presentation of the paths taken by a molecule of water as it circulates and re-circulates through the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere of Glacier Bay.
