Backlit by the morning sun’s glow, a humpback whale’s lazy exhale lingered in the cool, still air like a fiery cloud marking the behemoth’s progress through the mirror-calm waters of Endicott Arm. Excited at our first wildlife sighting, guests poured from their rooms in a way that only a whale can do. Fashion sense varied, but when in the presence of a whale, judgement is never passed.
We traveled further into the winding fjord, passing ice of varying size and shape, tempting us with photographic distractions, yet we pressed on. With the walls gradually closing in, our quarry came into view. The cerulean hues of Dawes Glacier were matched only by the clarity of a clear morning sky. Icebergs were strewn about the fjord’s flat water in swirls of chalky white, pressed on their wayward journey by light winds and pulsing tides. Peppering the ice lie the silvery harbor seals, some with small pups eagerly suckling on their mother’s fat-rich milk. It all seems so serene, if not for the thunderous crashes of fractured ice periodically birthed from the glacier’s ever-changing face. A small splash belies a future cacophony as water in two fundamentally different forms meet with such force that the shockwave reaches deep into the psyche of us all, creating memories and a common bond over one of nature’s great spectacles.
The glacier now behind us, we tucked into a small side fjord named for one man’s perilous experience many years ago, Ford’s Terror. Constricting Southeast Alaska’s tides through a small rocky entrance, the mellow marine heartbeat is transformed into an emotive string of frothing water and boiling waves. The rage is temporal in nature as the celestial pull wanes. Patience is the toll we must pay but the reward is worth the effort. Gliding through the passage, ominous cliff faces loom overhead with intimidating scope. Bereft of delicacy the mountains become the sea.
