Day 8 - 6/9/08

We cruised all day in Glacier Bay National Park. WOW! How can I communicate the vastness, the beauty of the place! We spent most of the day outside just taking pictures and looking for whales.

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The whales we saw were too far away for good pictures, but the ones we saw in the bay at Juneau made up for that--more about that later.

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Here are a couple otters we saw swimming as we sailed by.

We saw lots of Doll porpoise, but all that showed was their dorsal fin. They weren't the type that frolic and leap out of the water.

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Here is a seal I saw swimming--proving the absence of Orca whales (that love to eat seals).

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This is one of my favorite pictures of the trip. This eagle floated by on chunk of ice. He was enjoying a fish he'd caught.

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Is there any sight more magnificent than an eagle in flight!

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Here is a young eagle. They don't get their white head and tail feathers until they are 5 years old.

I'd hoped to see Puffin but didn't. Guess I'll have to make another trip to Alaska!

As glacier move, they pick up soil and rock that become imbedded in the ice. That is what the dark streaks shown here are.

These chunks of ice show the striping of rock and soil trapped inside.

As the ice melts and water evaporates from the path, glacial silt is left. I touched some of this at Mendenhall Glacier. It has the consistency of flour and reminded me of the gray dust that escapes when you empty the vacuum cleaner.

When a large chunk falls off a glacier it's called "calving." The sound is something you won't forget. To me it sounded like a crack and lightening and roll of thunder very close together. We heard the sound but didn't see any of the large pieces fall into the bay. We did, though, see lots of smaller "showers" of ice falling.

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Rangers from the Park Service came on board to join us for the day and serve as guides and interpreters. They told us the glaciers in this area were fairly "young." the pics that fell into the water as we were watching were only about 200 years old. The snow that created them was falling about the time James Madison was elected the 4th president.>

These are fissures in the glacier ice. As they grow larger due to freezing and thawing they will eventually separate from the glacier and fall into the water.