South Sawyer Glacier! This morning, when we emerged from our first night's sleep aboard the SEA BIRD, there was no doubt about it... we were definitely in Alaska... the Great Land! The sheer magnificence of granitic cliffs towering over and above us as we traveled up the narrow fjord of Tracy Arm….the uniqueness of the turquoise colored water studded with floating ice... the cool and refreshingly moist winds blown down valley from not so distant ice fields... and the subtle awareness of being in a new and primal place was the first thing that greeted our senses. Having left the city of Juneau in the wee hours of the morning, the SEA BIRDhad transported us to a wondrous world of rock and ice.
During breakfast the SEA BIRD nudged its way through a dense maze of floating ice to reach the head of Tracy Arm giving us our first views of the Sawyer and South Sawyer glaciers. These two tidewater glaciers descend from the Stikine Ice Field and enter the waters of Tracy Arm and the ice that we'd been moving through for most of the morning had been "calving" off the face off these glaciers. It was our hope to witness some of these calvings first-hand and we weren't disappointed in the least. Several large sections of the face of the South Sawyer Glacier plunged over 200 feet before our eyes. The time-lag between seeing the huge splashes and hearing the thunderous sounds of ice crashing into the sea gave us a sense of distance and scale. Imagine a 20-story building of ice collapsing into the sea in front of you! As a special treat we were given a rare sighting of a large column of submerged ice "shooting" up over 100 feet into the air from beneath the water. Added to this, several mountain goats grazed above the inter-tidal zone, harbor seals rested atop growlers or swam about the ship, and arctic terns and marbled murrelets flew above and around us. It was almost hard to take it all in and put it into perspective.
After this spectacular introduction to SE Alaska we cruised 25-miles back out of Tracy Arm to where we anchored up in Williams Cove for an afternoon of hiking and kayaking. Here we literally got our feet wet and our first taste of the Alaskan wilderness. If Dorothy were here with us today, she definitely would've known she wasn't in Kansas anymore!
