Ice Gardens of Le Conte Glacier, Alaska

Le Conte Ice Gardens

       A huge ice field forms in southeast Alaska’s coastal mountains due to an immense amount of precipitation coming in off the Pacific Ocean. This prolific snowfall produces the southernmost tidewater glaciers in North America. Le Conte Glacier is located near Petersburg, Alaska. Due to its high level of calving events the twelve and a half mile fjord heading back to the glacier’s face is often too choked with icebergs for vessels to reach it. However, reaching the glacier’s face was not our goal this trip.

 For a look at my first visit to these ice gardens and more places where nature sculpts works of art in ice check out these other posts:
*Le Conte Ice Garden
*McBride Ice Garden
*Mendenhall Ice Caves

 What drew us to this area is an area I like to call Le Conte Ice Garden. The terminal moraine left behind when the glacier retreated creates a very shallow bar that often traps big pieces of ice inside the bay for months at a time. Here ice of all sizes floats around and is sometimes left high and dry on the shoreline when the large tidal drops occur. Walking along the shore at low tide can be like walking through an ice sculpture garden, only this artist was nature herself.

  I put some of the best photos from this trip to the ice garden as well as others from around Alaska on my photo page which you can link to here.

Even the stub of an old tree looks like a work of art

  The forms of the slowly melting ice are endless. The guests and I wondered about them in awe. Watching them drip makes you realize that what you are seeing is just a fleeting moment in time, that no one else will see quite the same ever again. We skiffed and walked around the ice garden until it was time to head north towards whales and bears, but the images of the melting ice stay with us even now.