July 11: Glacier Bay

Today by special permit we cruised about 100 miles of the coastline of Glacier Bay, a 33 million acre national park. We were joined by a forest ranger named Allie, who gave us an overview of what we might be able to see at different locations.  Our luck was good and we saw them all. 

At South Marble Island we saw two kinds of puffins, both the more common Tufted Puffins and the rare Horned Puffin, as well as Harlequin ducks and Common Murres. There are only 2-3 pairs of the horned puffins in the entire park so it was great to see a pair.   At Tidal Inlet we watched a Coastal Brown Bear moving through the intertidal zone turning over rocks to look for barnacles and clams. Coastal Brown Bears are slightly larger than the brown bears found in the interior, probably due to the richer food sources along the coast. At Gloomy Knob we watched a group of 12 Rocky Mountain goats cross the steep rocky terrain, including two kids who played and scampered along the way. And on the ice floes in front of the Johns Hopkins glacier we saw harbor seals resting, including a few weaned pups left behind by their mothers.  The pups looked really sad and forlorn.

Overall it was a misty chilly day, particularly up by the glaciers, but the landscape was beautiful. We took a leisurely pace (speed limit is 13 knots) in order to protect the whales in the bay.  In 2001, a female humpback named Snow was hit by a large cruise ship and killed in the bay, but that disaster prompted much greater protections for them including the speed restriction.

Glacier Bay is the ancestral home of the Huna Tlingit people, who had summer camps along the braided rivers of the valley. In 1750, at the end of the little ice age, the great glacier surged forward and filled the whole valley as far south as Icy Strait, displacing humans and wildlife alike. Erosion from contact with the ocean then caused the glacier to recede again, and the current Glacier Bay is a consequence of the glacier’s action and the recovery of plants and wildlife over the past 200 years. 

Pictured: harbor seal pup, horned puffin, tufted puffin, Rocky Mountain goats, coastal brown bear