Day 3, Monday, August 2
Great breakfast. French toast and fresh fruit and bacon. This morning we headed to a place called Williams Cove. It has steep walls on most sides, but does sport a small, very rocky beach. First, we went for a hike up to a bog. Again the hike was challenging, but everybody was such good sports about it. There's one woman about my age travelling with an aunt who has to be at least in her mid-seventies and is almost totally deaf. But talk about adventurous and plucky! Both of them dealt with the challenges with humor and determination and independence.
William, our naturalist leader, and a botanist, loves to eat all the wild berries that abound in this rain forest. We ate red salmon berries and wild blueberries. The salmon berries were good, slightly sour. The blueberries were tart, but didn't have a lot of flavor. We climbed up to a bog, where William described how the bog forms, with a sealed rock face beneath, which did not let the water percolate, so all the acid in the trees gathered, creating an ecosystem that was unfavorable to the usual forest of spruce and alder. He showed us a plant (Snow Dew?), that is small and pink and sticky and attracts flies and eats them. That provides nitrogen for the plants in the bog. Also pole pine trees, grew there where others would not, and the lack of bacteria left the dead ones there for a long time, not allowing them to decay like they would elsewhere, which is why there were lots of dead trees sticking up out of the bog.
William with Salmon Berries
We climbed back down through the forest, with William yelling out "Osso!" (Spanish for "bear" – Williams was of Mexican origin) and clapping his hands every few minutes to scare off any bears, which he said were very common in this area. William was particularly enamoured of the salmon berries and picked us some to eat at the bottom of the trail.
Then we changed into our kayak 'skirts' and climbed into our two-man kayaks. They had given us a brief 'how to' on board the ship, and it didn't seem difficult at all, although the bulky lifejackets made getting the foot pedals and seat adjustments much more difficult. In the process, we saw a harbor seal motionless in the water about thirty feet offshore, his little head with its dark eyes and whiskered snout sticking out, watching us. Even after I pointed him out and everyone pointed and talked about him, he didn't move, then finally silently ducked his head under the water and disappeared.
We shoved off in our kayaks, with me in the rear working the pedals to the rudder and Ed in front. The things are practically effortless, and the day was once again almost too beautiful to be real. The sky was a cloudless blue, the temperature warm without being too hot. We paddled up a ways, past the ship, spotting another harbor seal and some beautiful birds. I heard someone say they were Merganser ducks. We could also hear raucous bird cries in the distance.
There were a couple of long waterfalls close to the shore, and the music of the running water carried a long way over this very, very still cove. Ed spotted a small weasle-type animal right along the shore. As I watched it ran into a little hole. It's hide was a rich brown rather than the gray/brown I had seen on the harbor seal, and I was certain it was a mink, although Ed thought it may have been a young seal. I asked Jason, the naturalist leading the kayaking, and he confirmed that it was a mink, and that they were very common along this shore.
We got back to the ship a little hot and sweaty, and very ready for the outdoor barbecue the ship's crew had decided to cook, since the weather was so unusually fine.
Everyone was feeling very jolly in the warm afternoon sun. We had our lunch on the third deck, and the crew served hamburgers and bratwurst hotdogs, salad and beer. It was delicious. Then the ship headed out of William's Cove down what was called Tracy Arms towards Sawyer's Glacier. The wind grew quickly colder and stronger, and small ice flows began to appear, each with a type-name according to its size. The larger ones were a wondrous blue color, unlike anything one expects to see in nature, and the light would shine off and through it in delicate traces through cracks that looked like lace.
We were getting close to the glacier when someone shouted that they had spotted orcas, killer whales, and the ship slowed. Soon a large pod, up to ten or more, of these black and white beasts, could be seen in the distance. First just small spouts, then black, sharp fins cutting through the water like deadly thorns. One, the big male, had a fin that was enormously tall and wicked looking. The others looked more like oversized black dolphins from that distance. The ship stopped and was moved around as the pod disappeared for several minutes, then reappeared very close to shore in the steep glacier valley, in a shadow that made them hard to see.
I circled around the ship and stood with a crewmember, who was taking pictures with a very fancy camera. I found out later it was a digital camera they used to post pictures from the trip to their website. She said that they didn't see orcas that frequently and they always took advantage of it when they did. The pod disappeared again for several minutes while the ship quietly hovered, moving along slightly in the same direction the pod had been travelling.
Suddenly they were all around us, on the other side of the ship and in front. Someone said later that the captain realized they had swum under the boat when the big male registered on his sonar, sounding the depth at only 56 feet, when the channel was hundreds of feet deep. They swam almost playfully along side, showing their beautiful, sleek bodies to us, then disappeared for the final time. One woman was almost in tears, telling me that she had dreamed all her life of such a thing happening, and couldn't believe it had actually come true.
They turned the ship around and we resumed our trek up Tracy Arms, with the naturalists pointing out the powerful effects of glaciation, and the visible difference created by the passage of time as, the closer we got to the front of the glacier, the less vegetation had had an opportunity to take any foothold in the hard, scrubbed rock.
The water turned azure, then almost milky with glacial silt, and again and again we saw long, magnificent waterfalls tumbling down the rocky cliffs into the fjords below.
The ice flows soon dotted the surface of the water and we turned the last corner towards Sawyer's Glacier. The intensity of the blue of the ice, and the cracks and fissures and shapes created by the enormous pressure pushing hundreds of feet of ice towards its final destination in the sea, was outside any experience or metaphor that comes to mind. There was an almost constant sound of creaking and sharp snaps and loud retorts coming from the ice, and periodically small chucks would fall, the noise of them reaching us many seconds later. It was only when we pulled much closer that I realized that those small chucks were the size of small houses, creating waves in the water that could swamp small boats.
The ice in the water was everywhere now, and the ship slowed almost to a stop. Someone pointed out a harbor seal sitting on a chuck of ice, then another and another. Then we realized that there were literally hundreds of them, everywhere, all over the ice flows. Small blond, brown and gray lumps watched us with only mild curiosity with their huge black eyes. Illiana, the sea animal naturalist, explained that they were there because of the food, because it was 'home' and largely because they were protected from the orcas by the ice flows.
Finally, to my surprise, the ship pulled even closer, the ice bumping and scraping against the hull, to within a quarter mile of the glacier. Now the sounds from the glacier were louder and sharper and we all shouted in awe and delight as a larger chuck of ice was 'calved', and fell with a huge roar and a giant splash into the water.
The naturalists pointed out the flocks of small white birds that were in busy motion over the area where the most recent calving had taken place. The stuff that was stirred up in the water by the falling ice was a food source for these birds, I believed they called Kittywakes.
Then the ship edged even closer, and closer still, until I heard a couple of the older passengers express some discomfort, because we were now within a quarter mile of the front of the glacier, with every brilliant color, each individual bird, the almost cathedral-like crystalline structure of the constantly shifting cracks and fissures visible to the unaided eye.
Evidently Mother Nature decided to give us one last finale for the day, and a huge block of ice suddenly broke away with a canon-like roar and heaved itself into the water, causing a splash that would have clearly gone up over the ship's rail had we been close enough. But we weren't "that" close, thankfully, and everyone gasped and oohed and aahed. We sat there for quite awhile after that as a bright sun sank a little lower in the sky, mostly silent or speaking in very quiet voices, as though we were in a church. Finally, the ship turned and slowly made its way back up the fjord through the ice, picking up speed as we finally cleared the ice flows, heading towards sunset and dinner.
I have gotten the distinct impression from what almost all the crew has said that this particular trip has been nothing less than spectacular both in the warm, wonderful weather and the continuing encounters we have had with nature's most impressive representatives.