Hubbard Glacier
The previous entry is Sitka.
June 4
For the Skagway glacier paddling excursion, the tour guide noted that there’s one ultimate answer to any question about why something is the way it is in this part of Alaska: the glaciers did it. Why are there seals here? Because there’s a lot of fish, which are there because there’s a lot of plankton, which is because the water conditions are so favorable, which is because of the glacier runoff. Why is the fjord so deep? Because of the weight of the glacier carving itself through bedrock over tens of thousands of years during the last Ice Age. Why does the forest look the way it does? Because of the progression of tree growth as the glacier retreats. The answer almost becomes so broad as to be a non-answer. I suppose the devil is in the details.
But it is because of the glaciers that large cruise ships sail into Glacier Bay and stay in position for hours on end, so that their passengers can happily snap pictures of the awesome landscape. We didn’t have a port of call today. Our course since leaving Sitka includes this pause at the Hubbard Glacier before heading into open sea to reach Seward, where we will disembark. Our morning was spent not going through the details of a shore excursion, but witnessing the grinding ice as it reaches into the water.
The ship took position 0.7 miles from the face of the glacier, the closest it’s ever been, according to the captain’s PA announcement. And the air was clear: passengers in previous voyages have noted that there were times when you could only hear the glacier but not see it through the rain or the fog. Ahead of us was the miles-long arc of ice, largely that strange blue color, with striations of pulverized rock leaving geological stripes across its flank. Behind and above it were the snowcapped mountains, whose ice feeds into the glacier, pushing forward at the rate of several feet per day. Small icebergs dot the water, as the advancing ice breaks off at the glacier’s edge and fall into the ocean. Unlike the glaciers we’d seen before, this is a tidewater glacier: it runs directly into the sea, rather than melting into a lake drained by a river, before reaching the sea.
The glacier makes booming, crashing sounds, like cannon fire, like thunder. Ice breaks off — the glacier is calving — and falls into the water. The ice is small in scale to the glacier, but is gigantic compared to human scale. Water can go hundreds of feet into the air in the splash.
Photographers on the prow of the ship, after shooting the landscape shots, tried to shoot the calving. It was sort of like whale watching, trying to get a picture of the tail before it slides into the water: we wait, cameras ready. Because the event is brief and sporatic, we would miss it if we were not looking the right way. Calving photography is a bit more difficult, because, at least with the whale, you have a good idea where it is because of the preliminary breaths it takes before its deep dive. With the glacier, at best you can say that a lot of ice seems to break off at this point and that point. And the physics of the sound adds to the difficulty: we’re far enough away from the face of the glacier so that the thunder of calving reaches us three or four seconds after it happens. If you follow the sound, you’ll just see the splash subsiding in the water.
I got lucky: my camera was pointed at the right spot when ice started to break off. And I moderated the pace at which I clicked the shutter, so as not to overwhelm the relatively slow CF card, thereby missing the last parts of the splash. Here is the start of the sequence, a bit zoomed in through post-processing to better show the action. With a fast CF card, one could almost have made a movie.
Some of the crew is also up on deck taking their own group pictures with the mountains and ice in the background. Most of them are Indonesian or Filipino, and perhaps this is their first cruise, too (this sailing by the Ryndam is one of the first ones for the season). Note that getting to the prow of the ship was somewhat non-obvious: from the promenade deck, you have to duck through a set of doors that are labelled “Emergency Exit”. There are no signs explicitly pointing the way to the prow, which ultimately wasn’t the best place to take pictures because of the depth of the crowd. Better is a wrap-around terrace that you get to by going through the fitness center.
There was a crewmember in a dolphin costume wandering around with a photographer, posing for pictures with anyone who wants it. The ship has a “photography gallery” where the pictures of the passengers taken by staff photographers are on sale. At every port, right after the gangway leading off the ship, photographers from the ship set up a little studio to take pictures of every group willing to pause a moment heading into town. Photographers also roam the main dining hall on formal nights to take shots of the passengers looking their best. All this output is displayed in the gallery, for sale to passengers who want a little souvenier.
After we got back to the ocean, the hotel staff gave a talk about disembarkation procedures that began with amusing anecdotes (Some of the questions the ship’s crew has been asked and have answered: Does the ship generate its own electricity? No, we run a very long extension cord from Vancouver. The breakfast eggs are delicious; do you make your own? Yes, Decks 2 and 3 are filled with chickens.) and ended with the little theater troupe in the entertainment staff singing something vaguely Broadway-ish in their farewell performance. In between, we were told how we would receive instruction packets with colored and numbered routing tags for our bags, which would be transported directly from the ship to our hotel (or at least a Holland America office in Anchorage if you were on your own after disembarkation). The instructions were ultimately a bit confusing and incomplete, and we had to have the concierge check some things for us. Other passengers weren’t as lucky and had to rely on the hotel front desk. During dinner, we were told that the lines were absurdly long: who wants to wait in line for two hours on a cruise? This and the confusion during the Sitka tendering operations left a sour impression about the cruise line to some people.
The tagged bags were to be outside the cabins by 2AM for the stewards to pick up for shipment to the hotels. I suppose someone wandering around at that time can help himself to all sorts of knick knacks if the bags aren’t locked, but we’re on a ship: where can you go?
Sometime after the disembarkation lecture, we had the second treat presented by the kitchen staff. This was a massive mid-afternoon dessert extravaganza, a few hours before dinner. The pastry chefs worked overtime to create fanciful pastry displays and chocolate sculptures. We were allowed a few minutes to photograph their work before the crowds were let in to devour the better part of their efforts. Some pieces were not served, untouched by the waiters dishing out the pastries. Likely, some of the more elaborate pieces really are art more than food, kept in the ship’s freezer to be put out once a week as the ship makes its rounds off the Alaskan coast: woe to any waiter foolish enough to carve out a piece from the white-chocolate cowboy.
Dinner was mere hours after gorging on chocolate and pastries. This was the night before disembarkation, so the dining room dress code was casual, as the formal night suits and gowns should already have been packed away. The night before, during the Baked Alaska parade, the kitchen staff was honored. This night, the waiters and the stewards were in the spotlight, as they gathered to serenade the guests at the end of the meal. What the Indonesian wait staff initially sang sounded remarkably like Auld Lang Sine, but then switched to a traditional Indonesian song, with the expected theme of parting voyages and farewells.
And just one more note on night and day, even this far of the Arctic Circle: it didn’t get particularly dark until midnight, and even then, there’s a bit of light in the sky. One night, I had hoped to get a see the stars at sea — what does the sky look like without city light, on the ship in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska? — but at most the sky was dusky. Seeing the stars during the summer is an impossibility, and Alaskans never see the summer constellations. But they get the aurora borealis during the long winter night.
The next entry is Seward and Anchorage.