Dateline May 23, 2011, Tracy Arm Fjord and Sawyer Glacier
This is a day that will be remembered the rest of our lives. At eight in the morning we boarded the Adventure Bound, a fifty-six-foot vessel out of Juneau, and headed south down the Inside Passage toward Tracy Arm Fjord and the face of Sawyer Glacier. The trip down was through unbelievably beautiful country, mountains rising right out of the sea, uninhabited by humans but very much inhabited by everything else. Bears, bald eagles, mountain goats, seals, humpback whales. The captain would slow down or stop whenever something appeared along the shore so we could get close.
The captain and owner of the boat was Steve Weber. There were about thirty of us aboard, and we were looked after in the cabin by a young man named Tim Treadwell, a college student studying geology and the son of Mead Treadwell, who was at the time the Lieutenant Governor of Alaska. Easy company on a long day.
As we entered the fjord, Steve eased the boat through the icebergs and iceflows, working carefully toward Sawyer Glacier. He brought us to within about four hundred yards of the face, which is as close as anyone gets to that glacier. This is one of the best arguments we know for seeing Alaska by road and ferry instead of from a cruise ship. The big ships cannot get past the icebergs to the inner fjord. They go some of the way in, but Sawyer they never see.
The water at the base of the glacier is nine hundred feet deep. We sat there for a long stretch, watching, listening to the cracks and groans of the ice, and from time to time seeing a piece break off and fall into the water.
The wildlife along the way had been almost as remarkable as the glacier itself.
The icebergs themselves drifted through the fjord in shapes you would not believe.
And the waterfalls came down off the cliffs on either side.
We took over five hundred pictures, and even now looking back at them, the photographs do not do the place justice. We will write more about the Marine Highway in a summary post later. But take this as our recommendation: stay off the cruise ships if you can. You miss the best parts of Alaska. The ships can show you the fjord, but they cannot get you to the glacier.
We were back in Juneau around six-thirty in the evening. A long day, and a day we will not forget.
