Glacier Bay From Our Room

We awoke to a more typical maritime Alaskan day that was cool, cloudy and with a little rain. Jess met up with Kate and Eileen (two of the women on our tour) for some morning exercise but it turns out the classes were canceled because the main activity for the day is Glacier Bay National Park. By the time we were getting ready, I happened to be watching the video feed from the bow of the boat and I could see a boat racing towards us. I knew park rangers would be getting on the ship but I wasn't sure how...it turns out they get alongside us by boat, match the speed and then climb up.

The majority of the day was spent cruising around the park and having the rangers guide us through wherever we were as well as provide additional information. We attended a talk by one of them about the history of the area in the main theater and not surprisingly, it was standing room only. It turns out the entire bay was covered by glaciers only 250 years ago when George Vancouver stopped by on an expedition. About 100 years later John Muir came to the area and discovered that while Vancouver's maps were very accurate elsewhere, they were very wrong here. He realized it was because the glacier is moving rapidly (geologically speaking) and carving up the mountains along the way. The park map has lines that show where the ice was in various years - in some spots, it's actually advanced miles since the 1960's but mostly it's retreated creating the fjords that are here today.

There were all kinds of wildlife - eagles and other sea birds, bears, mountain goats, sea lions and whales. Unfortunately we were on the wrong side of the boat for most of it and despite looking, I didn't see anything. They did set up a temporary ranger station so we checked it out to see if they had a passport stamp - and they did! That means Jess will have stamped three more National Parks on this trip.

As we cruised past islands, we eventually got to a few different glaciers. One, the Grand Pacific, is covered by dirt so it's not that impressive. The other, Margerie Glacier, is huge and very blue in spots and some hugs chunks calved while we were there. We also saw the blue Lamplugh Glacier and the Johns Hopkins Glacier, though we couldn't get close because seals were breeding - they use it since it's a protected area where whales can't hear the seals because the ice makes so much noise crackling.

The rest of the day was spent cruising back out of the park. We did a trivia event to pass the time and only missed one question out of twenty (to be fair, all but a few were easy - we realized the audience when one of the questions revealed Madonna was born in 1958 and someone behind us said "Wow, she's 63?"). The casino was closed because we were in US waters so we just relaxed in our room, watching the Stellar Sea Lions play right next to our boat in the rain.

We had a late dinner with Kate, Doug, Pat and Eileen and then tried to go to bed since we have an excursion in our first port and we have to be there pretty early.

As the Park Rangers say, "Don't feed the wildlife." Note: They do say this and the idiot kid below us didn't listen and we had a flock of seagulls buzzing us at the glacier because they thought we had peanut butter cookies.