Capturing the Moment

   As always with UnCruise, our itinerary leaves a lot of room for flexibility and inspiration. The group this week was really into glaciers after their opening day flightseeing trip over LeConte Glacier near Petersburg, AK. So our bold plan was to show them three glaciers on the last three days, all experienced in completely different ways.   Up first was Dawes Glacier. At the end of a beautiful fjord named Endicott Arm, a great tidewater glacier stands guard as it has for thousands of years. It slowly marches its river of ice down and through the mountains until ending in the ocean with a 200ft tall face that often calves great chunks of ice into the water. Here we took advantage of the calm, windless conditions to explore by kayak. We saw calvings, a shooter, and had a visit from a much appreciated cocoa boat serving hot cocoa with kahlua. Kayking through the ice and watching a glacier calve made the guests wonder what could possibly top this.   Next up...

A little too close Ice berg sculptures   Twice a year I am able to take my boat into the fabled Le Conte Ice Garden. You can read about my other visits to this ice garden and another here: Ice Garden Posts and Pictures.  Success!    Le Conte Ice Garden is located about 12 miles away from the calving face of the southernmost tidewater glacier in Alaska. Just outside of Petersburg, AK ice floating away from this glacier chokes up the mouth of the fjord as it gets grounded around the shallow bar created by the terminal moraine of where the glacier once was. My intrepid group of explorers 'Looking thru the ice'   Our goal for today was to skiff around some of the big grounded ice bergs, marveling at the shapes and deep hues of blue, before checking out some of the ice left high and dry by the extreme low tide. This was to coincide with the eclipse although the rainy cloudy conditions made the eclipse unseeable. Fortunately overcast conditio...

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 ba...

Ice Garden at LeConte Glacier Bay  LeConte Glacier is the southernmost tidewater glacier in the United States. It empties about 12 miles southeast of the fishing town of Petersburg. The fish packing plant at Petersburg gained prominence early on for using the abundant ice breaking off from the nearby glacier to pack the fresh fish and ship it to far off places like San Francisco.   LeConte glacier has receded about 9 miles from its terminal moraine. Now, a very shallow mud bar is all that remains to show how far the glacier once advanced to. This bar is a worry to boats trying to navigate through these waters, but it creates a pretty incredible sight just inside of it. All of these huge icebergs created by the actively calving glacier get grounded on the shallow bar and remain stuck inside the bay until they finally break apart or melt away. It was my goal to anchor safely outside the bar, then use small zodiacs to zip in and among the icebergs. I call this area the LeC...