South Marble Island
Having traveled up-bay all night, we awoke in Johns Hopkins Inlet. Rounding Jaw Point, we beheld one of Glacier Bay’s greatest vistas: a five-mile fjord ending in the mighty Johns Hopkins Glacier. Drawing nearer this river of ice, we got some inkling of its size – twelve frozen miles, creeping toward a terminus a mile wide, with 200-foot-high walls of ice. We saw a few crumbly falls of ice before turning our attention to seals. Looking from our vantage like pepper flakes, seals are actually stout five-footers. These creatures come to the inlet to warm up on a cozy iceberg while pupping or shedding their hair coats.
Next we traveled to Margerie Glacier, famous for its clean white color. Though a big cruise ship shared our view, we might otherwise have been here with Muir, who first beheld Glacier Bay on a day such as ours, calling it “dim, dreary, mysterious.”
The day continued to be foggy, but somehow we made our way to a great outcrop of rock. The grey massif, swathed in cloud, seemed aptly named “Gloomy Knob.” However forbidding to us, the knob is just right for mountain goats. We saw one bearded billy peering at us from a convenient ledge. Gloomy Knob is wrapped by paired salmon-spawning streams, which lure in the many eagles we spotted along its flanks.
Winding through Sandy Cove, we spotted herons, loons and eagles, then headed for South Marble Island. This island was scoured clean by the glaciers, and its bedrock is not conducive to plant growth. Isolated and a poor place for land predators, it is perfect for sea creatures. As we neared it, we saw that the shores of South Marble Island were fairly writhing with sea lions. These burly animals are thigmotactic – that is, they love contact, but they seem unable to be together without a lot of bickering and caterwauling. It was fun to see the ‘lions using each other as pillows, or clambering unceremoniously across one another. It was also fun to see a scrum of juveniles approaching our ship with obvious curiosity.
South Marble Island is also home to seabirds. We saw murres and guillemots, but surely everyone’s favorites were puffins. With extravagant eyebrow plumes and clown-colored bills, puffins are avian photogenic champs.
We also found many sea otters around South Marble Island. The story of otters in Glacier Bay is remarkable. The bay was filled with ice as otters were hunted to extinction in Southeast Alaska. Following their reintroduction to Southeast, otters have done well, but until 15 years ago, there were almost none in Glacier Bay. Now there are more than 5,000! Successional change, famous in Glacier Bay, is most easily seen in its vegetation. But changes in land mammals and birds, and in the marine environment, while harder to see, are perhaps even more interesting.
Lastly, we went ashore at Bartlett Cove. Most of us took a quick walk through forest that, though nearly 250 years old, is impressive mostly in its immature characteristics.
Glacier Bay is remarkable, even in this extraordinary part of the world. Huge calving glaciers, magnificent wildlife, interesting sea creatures, overlapping ecological stories, rich human history – all can be found here.
