Glacier Bay National Park, and the lodge, are inaccessible except by boat or airplane. It is a wonderfully remote place.
Our boat ride up to the glaciers isn't until tomorrow, so we spend the afternoon looking around and listening to the Park Rangers.
Laura Cheek is a former teacher turned Park Ranger. She tells us that 250 years ago, the land we are on was covered by a glacier. When the British explorer, Vancouver, sailed past the mouth of the bay in 1791, it was completely blocked by a glacier. In the intervening 200 years, the glacier has receded almost 40 miles, making this one of the most active glacier fields in the world.
Before it was covered by the glacier, this same land housed native Indians. The trees that used to be here were big enough that entire canoes could be fashioned from them by digging them out.
The Indians were forced off the land by the glacier as it approached, and resettled about 30 miles away, across from the mouth of Glacier Bay.
Today the oldest trees here are 70 to 100 years old. Since this is a temperate rain forest with the lush vegetation and huge plants, it more closely resembles the Olympic peninsula west of Seattle than the tundra of the Arctic.
At the end of our nature hike, we meet Emily and her mom, Esther, who are flying home to Boston this afternoon. I promised them their picture would get home before they did.
Tomorrow, we'll see glaciers in the morning, fly to Skagway in the afternoon, and drive back to Whitehorse in the evening, ready for good flying weather to return to the Yukon.
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