![]() The ice sheets that covered Southeast Alaska were the same as the ice sheets that covered much of North America as far south as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Glaciers came and went across this landscape – and the landscapes of all northern climes – for the last five million years. Soil and rock were pushed along by the glacier’s advancing snout, carving out u-shaped valleys and scraping deep scars into the hardest rock as it moved. (It’s the density of the glacier ice that gives it its blue tint, a blue that is sometimes so intense that it makes the ice appear to have a gelatinous core.)Įventually the glacial ice began to slide downslope. The pressure of the deepening snow compacted the bottom layers into hard, round ice crystals, compressed like sedimentary rock. It was thousands of years of snowfall, more than a hundred feet a year, that created the vast ice fields. ![]() ![]() Here, millennia of glacial movement have been compressed into centuries. Our guide, Steve Griffin, says he has seen bare rock appear where he recalls glacier only a few years before.įor scientists, the retreat of the ice in Glacier Bay is the end of an ice age, seen as if in time-lapse photography. Now, another hundred years later, there’s never ice in Icy Strait, and Muir Glacier has retreated another 25 miles, leaving this deep fjord behind. The sound of the water streaming down the distant cliff face and pouring over and through the mounds of gravel hardly makes a dent in this silence. Everyone makes note of it, stopping amid the packing of the kayaks to listen. When the planes leave and the sounds of their engines fade into the clouds, there is an awesome silence. The shapers of all this unconstructed mass stand at the head of the bay: glaciers that rise 150 feet above the tide line and then sprawl northward – jagged, crevassed, blue ice highways that have ground through the mountains from vast unseen ice fields. This is the end of Glacier Bay – or the beginning, depending upon how you conceive of time. It is a landscape scraped clean, a skeleton that will take a hundred years to flesh out.Īcross the narrow inlet the hard-chinned cliffside, a thousand feet high, is just as bare. Picture a gravel pit, with mounds of rocks of every size and description bulldozed into random piles. But the place looks as if it has been strip-mined. ![]() Our trip will take us back down the bay.Īs we wait for the other planes to land, I climb the rocks above the beach, searching for signs of life – any signs of life. Three planes will drop off the 12 of us and our gear, then pick up the weary-looking group that has just made the 60-mile, week-long trip up the inlet. Our kayaks are arrayed along the gravel beach. There is nothing else, just “a solitude of ice and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious,” as explorer John Muir put it in 1879. The barren rock slopes are cut through by cold narrow streams, and great blue rivers of solid ice run into an opalescent aquamarine bay. And when the plane descends through the mist above Muir Inlet, the east branch of Glacier Bay, the deep spruce forests – like the ones surrounding the small dock from which we’d departed – have vanished. This, he says, over the droning of the four-seater seaplane, was what most of Glacier Bay looked like only 200 years ago. Day One: Flying above the white cloud layer at 1,500 feet and seeing only the raw, rocky peaks of Alaska’s snowcapped mountains, our guide asks us to imagine the Ice Age, to think of the clouds as an endless snowfield 1,500 feet deep, filling the chasms between these huge mountain peaks. ![]()
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