Glacier Bay National Park
“Now I understand. I understand all the old attempts at description. I understand why they were written and why they failed.” Dave Bohn, Glacier Bay: The Land and the Silence
Under the cover of darkness and a crescent moon lying on her back we slipped into Glacier Bay National Park and ran north all night from the lower bay to Scidmore Cut, near Gilbert Peninsula. Our 5:30am wake-up found us adrift a short distance from a beached humpback, here since April (or perhaps before), that’s been a summer blubber buffet for ravens, wolves and brown bears. It takes a long time for a 40-ton marine mammal to decompose and be scavenged. Darkness pulled itself back slowly to reveal a golden shore with seven coastal brown bears and seven wolves playing their game of wildlife chess, each maneuvering past the others to get a piece of, well – the action. Our long lenses projected off the port side of the National Geographic Sea Bird like a photographic equivalent of the Guns of Navarrone, three dozen motor drives firing away each time two bears tussled, or a silver-black wolf, agile and sleek, slipped past the bears to get its share of the bounty and then disappear into the shoreline cottonwoods (where it probably cached its share of whale meat).
For two hours we let the morning magic unfold before running north into Johns Hopkins Inlet, the wildest Inlet in the bay, a seven-mile-long fjord with hanging glaciers and the knife-peaked mountains of the Fairweather Range rising 10- 12- and 15,000 feet above the sea. At the head of the inlet we spent an hour adrift in ice, one mile away from the impressive one-mile-wide, 250-foot-tall tidewater terminus of Johns Hopkins Glacier, one of the few advancing glaciers in Alaska. The sky made a sapphire, the sun a diamond, the icy heart of Glacier Bay a perfect solar basin. We basked in the warmth and sun-bathed on the aft-deck. The hotel department served Chai tea while Sean Neilson, our park ranger for the day, shared his knowledge, told great stories and made us laugh.
En route back down the bay, we sighted mountain goats on Gloomy Knob and Steller sea lions on South Marble Island.” Steller’s Angels,” we called them, gangs of young males on the rocks, boisterous and brash, as if they roared in on their Harleys and owned the place. Give them sun glasses and tattoos and the picture would be complete. Next, we sighted a pod of killer whales off Strawberry Island, their dorsal fins slicing the sea and catching the evening light. After dinner, we disembarked dockside in Bartlett Cove, near park headquarters, dabbled with capturing twilight images, and made a short visit to Glacier Bay Lodge, a fine end to a sterling, sun-splashed day garnished with thousands (no exaggeration) of good photographs. Lucky us.
