Day 5, August 4, Wednesday
Breakfast was early, and we picked up a Forest Ranger by the name of Kate at 6 in the morning. We headed into Glacier Bay for the day, starting at Marble Island and Marble Island south, where thousands of birds made their home. Most remarkable were the horned and tufted puffins, who looked like flying footballs with fat bodies and parrot-like, colorful heads.
We moved on to the second island and saw a whole group of sea lions lounging on the rocks. One kept sticking his head way up and "Ork, Ork"ed again and again at us, or at the other lions.
The scenery was spectacular, especially as the morning wore on and the clouds burned away for a blue, cloudless sky. Four days of sun is quite extraordinary, and it provided unusual long distance views of what was already a magnificent vista.
We also kept a look out for any wildlife along the shores of the fjords as we cruised slowly by. Everyone was out on deck the whole time (this was the one day I got a little sunburned), scanning the area with binoculars. We spied a mountain goat right along the water line. Normally, these animals are only seen way, way up high in the rocks. Even though my camera could not capture it as well as we saw the animal in the binoculars, it was fun to watch it scrambling along the shore.
We visited several glaciers, waiting and watching to see any dramatic calving, but no spectacular drops occurred. Nonetheless, the raucous cry of thousands of kittywates (sp?) swirling around the roiling waters at the bottom of the glaciers, and the loud bangs, cracks and booms of the ice as it shifted and moved, were well worth the trip.
The 'mother of all glaciers', the Grand Pacific Glacier, over two miles across at the front, is fed by more than two dozen other glaciers, and is so black with dirt and rocks that it hardly looks like ice at all. Like the other glaciers I've seen, it had an underground stream that created a hole at the bottom of the ice, through which massive amounts of water tumbles, sending spray and waves constantly bubbling around the hole.
We went back through the bay, past the Sea Princess, an enormous cruise ship that looked like a floating prison, with all its little holes drilled in the side. Hundreds of people were out on the top and second decks, but I also spied one man on a back balcony in a bathrobe. It was either a private suite and he was just standing there, not realizing he could be seen by us, or perhaps it led to a swimming pool area, as someone else suggested. The ranger said that two rangers usually worked on the big cruise ships when they came in, and that only two at a time were allowed in the park. One of them sat up in the control room and spoke over a public address system, not ever really seeing or talking to any of the passengers, while the other sat in a public room, greeting visitors and selling books about the park. She said it was not a very pleasant duty since she never got to meet any of the people she was supposed to be teaching.
She told several interesting stories, including one about a turn-of-the century gold miner and his wife who dug up rocks and hauled them in to be assayed every year for gold, rarely making any more than enough money to go back and do it again. The wife had planted three Spruce trees in an area that wouldn't normally have Spruce trees for another hundred years. She had also planted a rutabaga patch, and as we turned a bend in the fjord, sure enough, there on an otherwise almost empty plain, right at the edge of a glacier, were three tall spruce trees planted in the first part of this century, with the remains of a small cabin below. Kate, the Ranger, said she had been there, and that she had picked rutabaga out of the remains of the patch.
Kate recited lovely descriptive poems about the area, and I especially liked one quote, which I cannot recite verbatim, but the gist was that "eternity is happening right now," meaning that each moment is part of eternity, and the moment we are currently living is equal in importance to all the moments stretching both backward and forward in time.
Kate and her husband, also a Ranger, live in the Glacier Bay area all year round, in a town of about 400 people. She is lovely, articulate, good with people and obviously well educated. That she has chosen to live here and endure the hardship and isolation, for the sake of living in such splendor, I find very interesting.
We ended the day by docking in the town that houses the ranger station at the mouth of the bay. William took some of us on a 'fast' walk, more of a slight trot, except that he paused from time to time to point out plants, like two of the seven types of orchids found in Alaska. One of them was the Rattlesnake Orchid, with two dark green leaves that had a light strip running up the middle, with tiny flowers that had not yet opened. He also pointed out the feathery, almost mist-like horsetail rushes that made the undergrowth seem like a scene from a fairy tail in the evening twilight.