Early the next morning (as in 5 am, by dawn’s early light) the ship slowly cruised up the 30-mile long Endicott Arm Fjord paused at the Dawes Glacier, then turned and began its return journey.
Such dull language to express an outrageously spectacular experience. The Endicott Arm Fjord itself is a frozen wonderland full of granite cliffs, verdant valleys, and several gushing waterfalls. Then there is Dawes Glacier, a 600-foot-tall and mile-wide active icecap that “calves” all day long. (It’s a bit sad to see just how many pictures I took of bits of glacier floating alongside the ship!)
A professional naturalist narrated the journey for us, telling us about wildlife we might see (not much) and what the landscape revealed.
During the last ice age, over 16,000 years ago, most of Alaska was covered by two miles of ice. Glaciers slowly carved out spectacular valleys and fjords, one of which we were currently traveling down in a 112-year-old, beautifully converted wooden tugboat. Dawes Glacier, the one we were heading 30 nautical miles up Endicott Arm to see, once extended this far out. It pushed rocks, gravel, and silt, digging out a massive “gully” up to 1,000 feet deep in some places, leaving behind a picturesque terminal moraine called Wood Spit, where we had conveniently anchored the night before. You can’t look around at Alaska’s landscape and not see evidence of how glaciers sculpted this place—it’s everywhere.
As the ship steamed further up the fjord, it grew narrower, and the air got colder, as if we were entering a gigantic freezer. The mass of ice that makes up Dawes Glacier begins with the Stikine Icefield at an elevation of 5,200 feet (1,585 meters). From this source, the ice flows slowly—about 15 feet per day—along the path of least resistance. Multiple tributary glaciers feed into the main tongue, like streams into a river. This mass of ice cools the air around it, and the cold, dense air stays within the confines of the fjord, flowing outward.
The first visible sign that there’s a tidewater glacier ahead of us is the presence of small pieces of ice, looking like sculpted crystals, floating by the ship. These aren’t icebergs—these are mostly bergy bits (1-5 meters in size) or growlers (<1 meter in size). They’ve crumbled off the face of the glacier into the water and are flowing out with the wind and tide. And they are an eerie pale neon blue. It’s unearthly.
You see, glacier ice is blue. Ice traps long wavelengths of light, such as red and green, while allowing the shorter wavelengths, like blue, to pass through the ice and reach our eyes.
This is a long morning of slow movement, a 360* turn so everyone has a chance to see the magnificence from their balcony, or breakfast. Truly a highlight of the trip, and a “bucket list” event that I am very glad to have done.
