The whale room was awash with grade school students. Staring wide-eyed at the stuffed gorilla, sitting on the floor, sketching and taking notes on the okapi. The three whale skeletons hanging from the ceiling were the capstone. A sperm whale, fin whale and a right whale. I see humpbacks in the wild all the time, and we have some bones lying around the office waiting for a display to be built. But here was the real thing, up close and assembled. It is the baleen thing that has always confused me. Even though I once helped cut baleen out of a [View Full Entry]

---

---

Your boat sits in front of Margerie Glacier and you wait. Sometimes your voice is a little hushed, listening for the first telltale clunks and splashes that might be the harbingers of something larger, much larger. If they are close you might hear and shift you focus in time to see a chunk, or a mammoth chunk or even a ¼ of the entire glacier front crash down into the ocean. It is a spectacle, the calving of a tidewater glacier. Technically if the ocean water touches a glacier, it is tidewater. But not all tidewater glaciers are created equal... Some [View Full Entry]

---

---

The earthquake wasn't huge, but asleep in the dark tent with my ear pressed to the gravelly ground, it was an awakening of a different sort. I groggily phased toward consciousness feeling the whooshing of a big gust of wind about to hit and then the tent started shaking and rocks started to tumble down the cliff behind us. We were camped in the center of the out-wash plain that in 1958 was ground zero for the massive landslide that created the worlds largest tsunami. In 1958 the point beneath our tent was deep, deep water. Th [View Full Entry]

---

---

Walking on ice, the big ice, a glacier. You know it is different... this is the stuff that's usually floating around in your soda on a hot summer day, but no, there is so much of it you are standing on it. At the ocean you get in it. Here it supports your weight. I use to go on snorkeling vacations and I'd tell folks it was the closest to off planet travel I'd ever get - it's a different world underwater. But really, a glacier walk is just as close, maybe closer. From camp we scrambled down the mountain slope, [View Full Entry]

---

---

From the ice, the snow dome looked like a great campsite - the top of the dome was level and level was in very short supply on the Lituya Glacier. But up close the snow dome was pockmarked with rocks fallen from the steep cliff above. So we climbed back up onto the glacier and camped on the ice. Took us a half hour of scrambling over seracs, crevasses and rock to find a semi-flat area almost big enough for the tent. We leveled out the site using our hands and feet to scrape wet grit and gravel and pack it [View Full Entry]

---

---

I got out of the tent and started walking... barefoot... Now, it's Alaska and barefoot is not the usual mode. But it was June and the sun was out, just topping the mountains and filling the beach. The light was low and the shadows long. I walked the beach and spent a lot of time watching for pointy bits... but oh the tracks. Bear tracks, raven tracks, wolf tracks and gull tracks. Took a zillon photos and figured that if nothing else happened photographically that weekend I'd be happy... As we sat at the edge of the grass watching over the [View Full Entry]

---

---

Full moon, sand beach, bonfire, pizza and friends... Sounds good and was... but really, what were we thinking!!! January in Glacier Bay. 17 degrees Fahrenheit (-8.3 degrees Celsius)... Snow and ice, long-johns and gloves... not your typical full moon beach party for sure. The days were short, maybe 7 hours of daylight. We skied, ate, slept and sat by the fire for hours. We brought a duffle full of wood to burn - it was our saving move. Next day I paddled up the river a ways. White snow and blue sky. [View Full Entry]

---

---

A different planet this… The sun is low, all day. In the early afternoon it is late - the sun slides below the cloud shrouded mountains and dusk lingers just three hours past noon. There is only one color to be seen, blue, from the glacier ice and from the fleeting windows through the wind driven clouds. The bits of blue mix with an infinite number of shades of gray - and the white of snow, everywhere. There is a feud between the snow and gray. Even in the faintest of sunlight snow on the landscape wins and white prevails. All [View Full Entry]

---

---

The Brady Glacier is an icefield - a huge sheet of ice. The key word here is ‘sheet’. If you think of alpine and valley glaciers as being frozen waterfalls and rivers of ice then you would think of an icefield as being an upside down dinner plate of ice. There is a large portion of an icefield that is closer to flat than it is to being ‘mountainous’. They are not really flat, but they get close. And you’ll see this in the photos: often the horizon doesn’t look ‘straight’. It’s not that the photo is crooked! It’s the gently [View Full Entry]

---

---

“Spur Lake” is a 'glacially dammed lake' - one end of the lake is a wall of ice, the Brady Glacier. Ice calves off the wall and floats in the lake. Spur Lake is officially not named - you won’t find the name on any maps. I call it ‘Spur Lake’ because it looks, from a map, a bit like a thorn or, spur. But if you come to visit you can call it anything you’d like! Glacially dammed lakes are unusual in that one side of the lake is a wall of ice that holds back the water. Most of [View Full Entry]

---

---