Glacier Bay National Park

"Dim, dreary and mysterious.”John Muir’s 1879 quote about Glacier Bay was definitely descriptive of our misty morning. Though the clouds and moisture hung low, our spirits were high as we welcomed our lively and interesting park ranger, Richard Becker. He spoke eloquently about Glacier Bay, a land covered by ice just 200 years ago. After breakfast we slowed down to take in South Marble Island, a small dot of land rising from the swirling fog. The eerie and lonely cries of gulls were soon overshadowed by the grunts and roars of Steller sea lions. Tufted puffins took center stage with their improbable colorful beaks and feathered tuffs. On a clear day, they might not have stood out, but on a day filled with fog, they provided us with a splash of sunrise orange.

At Tidal Inlet, we got a fleeting glimpse of a brown bear. Large, even without binoculars, it captured our imagination. A quote from John McPhee’s Coming into the Country says it all: “The sight of the grizzly bear stirred me like nothing else the country could contain. What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominate thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same country all around that! He implied a world.” Later, our luck quadrupled as we silently watched a mama brown bear and her cubs amble along a beach. Standing, running, sniffing and munching, the three little ones frolicked in the mid-day hours. Transfixed, we didn’t even notice that the lunch hour came and went. Nothing quite says "Alaska!" like the sighting of a bear.

In the afternoon, we left “dim and dreary” behind and moved into “mysterious.” As we approached the spectacular Johns Hopkins Glacier, the clouds lifted and we caught sight of high peaks behind the impressive wall of ice. No wonder Richard said it was the “Sistine Chapel” of natural settings. The only thing that would have made the afternoon sweeter – and did – were chocolate concoctions from the galley. Fortified, we viewed a slide program by Kim Heacox entitled “Gratitude.” The drizzle returned as we made our way down the bay, but it didn’t matter. We’d had such a wondrous day, our spirits remained high as the barometer dipped lower yet. After dinner, we disembarked at Bartlett Cove and strolled around Glacier Bay Lodge in rich Alaska twilight.