Panic for no Reason

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When I set up the trip from Seward to Kenai Fjord National Park, the boat was to leave at 11:30 in the morning. Seward is located about 120 miles from Anchorage. But there is, like many places in northern countries, two main seasons on roads: winter and construction. It is supposed to be about a 2 and a half hour drive from Anchorage to Seward. The women in the tour off in Anchorage told me to give myself a minimum of 4 and a half hours to account for the major construction areas on the road between the two cities. They had been hearing stories of 30 minute delays in some places. This caused me some panic. I would have to be leaving around 7 o'clock in the morning. I set my six alarms again and then, as often happens in situations like that with me, I had trouble sleeping. I slept fitfully before awakening at about 5 in the morning with no particular urge to keep sleeping any longer. I pretended that I was still going to sleep for about half an hour more before I just gave up and got up. I packed up and headed off. I may as well get a really good head start on the day if there was going to be those kind of delays.



I passed a bit of construction that had one way traffic that delayed me for about 2 minutes. Maybe. And that was it for a long time. It even seemed that I was going to encounter nothing more. Then I came to a second, and much longer bit of construction. It looked like there may have been some kind of pilot car setup to take people through the spot, but it wasn't in use this day. And it seemed that it wouldn't be necessary most of the time. And the site was quiet anyway, being Sunday. I felt a bit foolish getting suckered in by my own paranoia. It was still much better to be early, and really, REALLY early at that, than to be late for some reason and watch as the boat was pulling out. But I still felt a bit misled by the women in the office. I shall have to let them know that it would be better to just impress the need to be early and that leaving as early as possible would be the best policy. I arrived in Seward with 3 hours to spare. 3!



But this gave me time to do something in the meantime. So when I passed the turnoff for Exit Glacier, I turned off. I headed up a valley to the Exit Glacier area of the Kenai Fjord National Park. The glacier is so named because there was an exploration party up on the Harding Icefield, above the glacier and all the glaciers in the park. They found a convenient place to exit the icefield, which happened to be at Exit Glacier. The name for the glacier ensued.



There were a couple of hikes around the glacier. One was up to the Harding Icefield, but it would take 6-8 hours to hike. This was not going to work. And I didn't have much in the way of things to eat on the way anyway, so I didn't go on that one. The other hike was to the foot of the glacier. This was only supposed to take about 1-2 hours. That worked for me and my time frame. So I headed on out. There were signs with years on them periodically. I took these, correctly I found out later on one of the interpretive signs, to be the location of the toe of the glacier in those years. I wasn't sure how they would have known the placement of the glacier in 1815, but I assumed they had ways. But the first sign I came across was 1917. It was located almost a mile away from its present position. That makes it that the receding glacier is losing about 15 meters a year. That is huge movement. You would almost be able to watch it recede daily at that kind of rate.



As I got closer to the glacier, I found a spot where people had been able to touch the glacier only 14 years before. Now the toe of the glacier was about 200 meters away. That seemed incredible to me. Now the toe of the glacier is in a position that is quite dangerous, and it is no longer possible to get that close to the glacier. That's okay. I have been on glaciers before and had glacier water to drink and all that kind of thing, but it still would have been cool.



As I was headed down, I stopped at a viewing spot on the debris plain below. There was some explanation of how they determined some of the spots where the foot of the glacier used to be. At times in the past couple of hundred years the glacier slowed down or reversed direction. There were moraines for when that happened. I don't know how they determined the exact dates of these events, probably written records of some kind, but the moraines identified the spots for the signs. Other spots were by photo. And so on.



As I looked up at the glacier a volunteer park interpreter, Carolyn, came along and explained some things to me. Then she looked up at the glacier and saw some people on the glacier. I don't know how she spotted them, but she pointed them out. She wondered what they were doing, as they didn't seem to be in a spot they were supposed to be. I took a photo for her. They were indeed people. She really had eagle eyes. She asked me to take the photo in to the park office in Seward when I got a chance.



It was getting time to go and catch my boat. I told her I would take the photo in and I headed off.



I got to Seward still in plenty of time and registered to get on the cruise and got my boarding pass. And we were off. It was going to be a gorgeous day, and I sat in the bow with a couple of other people. We were determined that we were going to see everything. When lunch was served, none of us even went in for that. I was the only one who really missed out because the other two had spouses who saved theirs for them. But it was a chicken caesar salad wrap. It didn't sound overly appetizing to me, and it certainly wasn't elaborate. The star for me was the trip anyway, so I didn't think I missed anything.



The captain was really good and he gave a great talk all the way along. And despite the plan, animals don't always follow schedules (actually they never do), so when we would come across some wildlife, he interrupted where we were going and stopped to see the animals. Except the porpoises. He told us he wanted to find the biggest pod of porpoises before he would stop. Of course that only works if you come across what you consider to be the biggest pod. As it happened, we only saw a few small groups of porpoises, we never stopped to have a look, and as a result we didn't really see porpoises. But...



We saw sea otters. There was one we passed. Just as the captain thought he would turn around and go back to have a look, he saw two more ahead and so we just went and looked at them. He told us all about sea otters while we all had a good look. He did tell us that sea otters have the best fur in the world of any animal. I wasn't sure about that. I thought I had been told that vicunas had that distinction. I shall have to look that up. It could be one of those well-our-national-animal-has-that-distinction things and both the US and Peru try to claim it. I don't know.



Then we headed on. It wasn't long before some humpback whales were spotted. And the captain informed us that we were seeing feeding humpback whales, which was unusual. I remember when these whales were endangered, but they came off the endangered list about 3 years ago. We humans CAN do it when we try, I guess. Feeding humpbacks do things like breach, which swimming ones don't really do. So we saw that behaviour as well, although I wasn't quick enough with my camera to capture that.



The sky cleared up as we left the inlet where Seward is located. We were told this was also unusual. The captain told us they referred to such days in Seward not as clear days, but as days that had cloud failure.



We saw more whales as we went along. We also saw some puffins at times, but from far away. One of my bow companions had a really nice lens for his camera and so got a couple of nice shots of puffins swimming, but he wanted more.



We headed into the park now and up to the glacier. We got to go right up close to it, as close as safety permitted. The nice day made the glacier quite active, at least it seemed so to me. There was quite a bit of calving although we didn't see a really big bit of ice come off. I think one spot was quite close, but we left before it fell, if it even would have done so this day. Nevertheless, there was a lot of activity at the glacier and we heard lots of snaps and cracks and groans. It was exciting.



Then it was off to the rookeries. We saw lots of birds, including puffins. I would like to have gotten a good photo of them, but I think my little camera just isn't up that sort of photography, getting good photos of fast moving, small birds. Oh well. I got some blurry photos of them. They will have to do.



Then we headed to a sea lion rookery. It was unusual to be able to go and see that one. Normally, the seas are too rough to be able to get close, but once again, the nice day allowed stuff that was unusual. We saw lots of sea lions, including babies. We went to another spot with sea lions, but this second one was just a hauling out and sunning spot rather than a nursery. But it was still neat.



Some more birds and then we were headed back to port. It had been a very good day for wildlife and the tidal glacier had also been very interesting. It was money well spent for this tour as well.



In town, I went to bring my pictures in to the national park office. It turned out that the glacier climbers knew what they were doing, and had been in the safe zone, so they didn't need the photos. But as I talked with the ranger, he gave me some great ideas for places to stay. Independence Day is in a few days and it was getting busy in town, with an annual local foot race on July 4^th bringing lots of people to town. I headed out to find a free camping spot (but there are no showers with such spots, so they aren't completely ideal; but then they are free, so I don't complain), set up my tent and caught a nap to catch up on what I lost the night before because of worry.

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Photos

Where the Glacier Was
The Exit Glacier was at the spot where the photo was taken only a few years ago. It's startling to see just how quickly it's receding.

Looking Down Into the Valley
The glacier extended out past the rocky slope not too long ago.

Glacier Hikers
A volunteer patroller was alarmed when we saw these two hiking on the glacier. She thought maybe they weren't allowed to be there.

Bright Day
Most days are overcast and rainy, but we had a great sunny day to go out and see the Kenai Fjord National Park.

Sea Otter
The Kenai Fjord Glacier boat tour started out and we quickly came across a couple of sea otters. although they look cute, we were told they are actually quite vicious.

Humpback Whales
Early in the boat tour, we came across a bunch of feeding humpback whales, displaying rare behaviour. They seemed to be engaging some kind of bubble net fishing.

Kenai Fjord Glacier
We came into this little bay, with a glacier that came down to the ocean. We watched it for a while, but didn't get to see any large-scale calving.

Little Icebergs
Although the glacier didn't have any major calving event, there were the remains of its calving activity all around the little bay.

Puffins
After the glaciers of the national park, we headed out for some bird watching. Not my thing really, but we did find a lot of puffins. They were difficult to photograph though because they moved so fast.

Sea Bird Rookery
This was a better view of a puffin, along with one of the other sea birds, possibly a murre. But I don't really know birds, so it's probably best not to take my word on that.

Sea Lions
We also went to a sea lion rookery and watched the animals laying about on the rocks.