Glacier bay day – Ice Ice Baby!

I woke up like this:

What a way to start the day! Last night the captain noted we’d reach Glacier Bay around 6am, so we dutifully woke up on time, and weren’t disappointed. And that’s despite the thick fog. One minute, everything’s crystal clear, then, quick as you like, you can’t see more than a few metres.

We got brekky out of the way nice and quick, coz today was a day where we were promised incredible sights in And around Glacier Bay. They didn’t disappoint. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking. (Internet permitting, as always!)

A national park ranger boarded the ship and gave a great talk about the area, it’s history, and geology. The surprising thing was that Glacier Bay has only been around for about 150 years – before that, it was just ice.

While on the way to the glacier there was a lot of beautiful scenery to see. There were also some bears, but they were so far away I had no chance of getting a photo. Saw some otters from a long distance, so the picture isn’t much good. It was nice walking around the promenade deck, just taking pictures as things passed by.

Cleared for take off

Coming in to land

Structure of the ship make for a nice frame

The fog finally parted late in the morning, just in time for the main event – the Marjorie glacier. This one we were able to get quite close to, and the boat stayed quite a while so we could all go ooh and aah and take lots of photos. It really was kinda breathtaking, the awesome scale of it. It was hard to get an idea how big it was, til we saw a tiny speck at the bottom of he glacier that turned out to be a small boat. We got to see a few occasions of the glacier “calving”, where chunks of ice would fall off the front and into the water – hence there were also a lot of itty bitty icebergs floating around in the water.

The photos aren’t in chronological order.

Splash! “Calving” in progress

Little boat (bottom left) big glacier (everywhere else)

The long and winding glacier

Little boat big glacier, part 2

One of the many little icebergs that calved from the glacier

We weren’t alone – the Eurodam also checking out the glacier

A retreating glacier, no longer flowing to the ocean

It was made abundantly clear that some of glaciers are retreating up to 5 feet a year due to climate change. Alaska is really changing because of it. They told us to really reduce the burning of fossil fuels … while we’re on a huge boat churning through a metric shedload of diesel. But anyway…

The scenery was gobsmackingly beautiful, incredible. I’ll never forget it.

After heading back from the glacier we passed the land of many seals – and many more birds.