Cruise — Day 04 —Glacier Bay 



Ship's Time 21:53 (Monday, June 12, 2006).
Ship's Position 57° 26.59' N, 136° 45.29' W (About halfway between mouth of Glacier Bay and Sitka).

Pictures for this blog can be found here.

We awoke this morning to total overcast and fog and we were not too hopeful ofseeing much of Glacier Bay National Park. We turned the corner by Gustavus and headed into the bay about 7 AM. A little history; when George Vancouver's ship reach here in 1794, the 20 mile wide mouth of the fjord was closed by a wall of ice which was the Grand Pacific Glacier. By 1879 when John Muir visited here, he had to paddle inland some 50 miles to find the glacier. Today we will sail 65 miles inland to find the face of the Grand Pacific Glacier up above the Margerie Glacier, sitting on the border with British Columbia. According to the Tlingit Indians who lived in Glacier Bay prior to its advance, some 400 years ago, the ice started pushing down the fjord as fast as a dog could run. The advance sounds like it may have been in response to the Little Ice Age that gripped Europe for some 300 years, ending in the 1600s, Snow piled up in the icefields above the fjord we're sailing through today and finally spilled over into the fjord, pushing the Tlingit out in a very short period of time. The Grand Pacific Glacier filled the fjord with ice up to 4,000 feet deep for 150 years, and sometime between 1750 and 1780, began the fastest retreat of any glacier system in recorded times.

We headed down to breakfast in the Rotterdam Dining room and as we were sitting down it really fogged in outside. Needless to say we were more than a little bummed out. We ate and occasionally looked out, hoping for the best until we had just passed the nose of Lampugh Glacier it suddenly turned a whole lot brighter. By the time we got back to our cabin, we were totally in the clear, surrounded by high, jagged peaks, cloaked in alpine glaciers — some of them hanging ominously, looking ready to crash thousands of feet down the steep walls of the fjord — and cascading waterfalls over 1,000 feet high.

We had to bundle up good out on the forecastle of the ship, for the temperatures were in the upper 30s, even in the sun. We stayed at Margerie Glacier for about an hour, waiting for her to calve off some icebergs, but she just did a lot of large icefalls off her face while we were there. Margerie Glacier is more or less a static tidewater glacier, losing 8 to 10 feetoff her mile-wide, 150-foot high face a day, while pushing down from her source 21 miles back up in the icefields by the same 8 to 10 feet a day. Behind her we could see Mt. Quincy Adams at over 12,000 feet and Mt. Fairweather at 15,300 feet. To north of Margerie Glacier was what is left of the Grand Pacific Glacier, its grounded face — it has recently ceased being a tidewater (ice no longer making contact with seawater) — two miles wide and covered with moraine debris to the point where it no longer looks like a glacier at all. we took lots of picture and fortunately the temperature warmed to the low 50s, so we could finally take those pictures without having our gloves on.

By now it was lunchtime, so we retreated and refueled. We came back to our cabin and we shot pictures of Lampugh and John Hopkins glaciers from our verandah. We left these behind and cruised past Reid Glacier on the way out. As we got closer to the mouth of Glacier Bay, the wind picked up considerably to Force 7, Near Gale Force which made for very rough seas, but we were out on the verandah snapping pictures of whales. We spotted maybe as many as eight humpbacks over a ninety minute stretch.

Tonight was our night for the Pinnacle Grill. All ships have dining rooms that would qualify as 4 --star restaurants on land, the Pinnacle is a 5-star. I started off with a beefsteak tomato salad with basalmic vinegar and pesto dressing and Lynda had seared duck breast. Both were delightful! We both decided on filet mignon, she had a 6 ounce petit cut and I had a 10 ounce Pinnacle cut. I ordered mine without sauce — if a filet can't stand on its own flavor, either you have bad meat, or a worse chef — and Lynda had a Bernaise sauce, which was also with her asparagus side dish; I had scallaped potatoes. I had to send mine back to be butterflied as it is hard to cook a three inch thick filet to well, but it turned out wonderful, still fork-tender and juicy and just unbelievably flavorful. Lynda's was perfect on the first try. I opted for dessert, The Not-So-Classic Baked Alaska.

We crawled back to our cabin and watched Capote (not the greatest of movies) and hit the hay, early day in Sitka tomorrow.  

Posted: Tue - June 13, 2006 at 01:58 AM          

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