Part VIII - Glacier Bay - June 11, 2002

Four AM comes around and I wake like a shot. Irene has decided she wants to get up with me, so I jostle her and we sneak out of the cabin and head to the Lido restaurant for coffee.  Sunrise this morning is at 4:12 AM, but it’s hard to tell because the sky is still overcast.  We have been cruising down the Gulf of Alaska all night, but early this morning we see land on our left.  The mountains disappear into the clouds at perhaps 3000 feet.  It is quite a distance from College Fjord to Glacier Bay, and we won’t reach the glaciers until early afternoon.  Meanwhile, a quiet day has been planned.

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is a 3.3 million acre park, which can only be reached by boat. The bay itself is 65 miles long and has any number of fiords and arms leading off it. We cruise past Spencer Point where we see a lighthouse built on a rock promontory and head into the bay. It will be five or six hours before we begin to see glaciers.  At about 10:00 AM a motor launch comes alongside and a team of National Forest Service rangers come aboard to provide interpretation and information about Glacier Bay.  Mom and Irene watch our progress from the deck for a while, but it is cold and raw, so they return to our cabin.  They can sit on our veranda and see plenty of view while shielded from the wind.  If it gets too chilly, they can step inside for a while.

I head for the Rubens Lounge to hear the naturalist from Glacier Bay Park speak. Instead of talking about the park, he starts talk about himself and I leave. Behind me, the deluge. Many of the people on the Veendam really want to learn about Alaska, but they're not really interested in the ranger himself. I walk out on deck to watch the hills and small glaciers glide buy. The ship is moving very slowly, barely maintaining way. It is quiet, suitable to the massive and forbidding country we're passing. A few smaller glaciers reach from the shore up through rounded valleys shaped by eons of glacial action. The mountain tops and the long, deep valleys are not visible. The colors are muted and dark.  It's all still beautiful.

After the naturalist, a native interpreter is scheduled to speak in the Rubens Lounge. The interpreter, a tall handsome Huna Tlingit woman begins her talk by apologizing for offending anyone. She then tells of Tlingit life and traditions. She also tells the story of how Christian missionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century forced the Tlingit people to give up their totems and ceremonial dress and artifacts, claiming the Tlingit were worshipping idols.  Actually, the totems tell stories about great people and historical incidents in the Indians’ lives.  Furthermore, the Tlingit were not allowed to speak their language and most of the people who are now middle aged grew up without their own voices.  Rarely have I been so moved by a presentation.  Carol went on to tell us that Tlingit language is now taught in the elementary schools and at the University of Alaska.

We move slowly up the ever narrowing bay passing islands and inlets.  At each turn I guess which way we will go next.  Sometimes I guess right.  We turn into a narrow inlet on our left and see the Johns Hopkins glacier flowing down to the sea.  It is about two miles wide where it hits the inlet and its face is 250 to 300 feet high.  Even though we must stop about two miles away from the face because of the ice flows, the sheer size of this moving river of ice overwhelms.  Lying around on many of the icebergs, harbor seals bask in the gray light, paying little attention to this huge intruder into their country.

The face of the Johns Hopkins glacier rises almost 300 feet from the water's surface.	Seals bask on the ice flow as the ship glides silently by.	In one of the ship's lounges, cruisers participate in a beauty seminar, oblivious to the natural beauty outside.	In the computer room, people catch up on their e-mail or surf the web.	The Marjorie glacier takes up the entire head of a long finger in Glacier Bay.	The blue color of the glacier comes from the extreme compression of the ice. It takes forever to melt in drinks.

The phenomenon of the cruise ship is indeed an interesting one. We are living for a week in an environment hermetically sealed off from the country through which we are traveling Except in port, we have little or no impact on the land through which we are traveling.  Except in port, we have little or no impact on the land through which we travel, and, perhaps more important, it can’t touch us.  This means no garbage is thrown off the vessel as it steams along.  Furthermore, unlike the earlier days of huge passenger ships, human waste is collected, stored, and pumped out at shore stops along the way.  It appears to be a goal of Holland America Line to make as little environmental impact as possible.  Nevertheless, the Park Service has limited the number of visits cruise ships can make to Glacier Bay to reduce their environmental impact.  At the same time, our experience is, in many ways, a sterile one in which we don’t experience any of the wild in wilderness. For many people on the ship, this is as close to wild as they want to get.

Slowly, the ship turns in the narrow confined space and drifts away from Johns Hopkins.  At the end of the arm we turn left up another arm and cruise slowly up Tarr inlet to Margerie Glacier.  Margerie, too, is wide and fractured and blue.  I’ve never understood why climbers writing about Everest expeditions speak of the difficulty of climbing the Khumbu Glacier.  Now it all becomes clear as the glacier forms spires and fissures almost impossible for a climber to work through. It looks like hundreds of church spires placed next to each other tumbling towards the sea. The translucent blue of the ice emits its own glow. A huge piece of the glacier seems ready to calve off, but I tire of waiting for it. A few moments later I look again and it's gone. Again, the captain gives us plenty of time to enjoy the glacier, the animals, the weather, the scene. Later, he begins to head down the bay as we head towards Sitka.

We've had a long day, so dress for dinner in the Rotterdam Dining Room is casual tonight. After dinner, we rush to the Rubens Lounge to get a good seat for Jeff Civillico's juggling show. Suprisingly, he's very entertaining, and we all have a good time. It's still light outside as we head out to sea. Mom and Irene go to bed, while I spend another hour in the Crows Nest watching the sea and looking for whales. Sunset tonight is 10:06 PM, but we see neither the sunset nor the sun. It never gets dark. It's 118 nautical miles to Sitka. As we head out to sea on gently rolling waves we can see some blue patches of sky.