Capturing the Moment

  I love kayaking here in Alaska, and especially when we can kayak around ice. This day was especially good, with glassy calm conditions and a never-ending floating ice garden to explore. Discovering a new place to take our guests for adventures is always a good feeling. It is so nice having the flexibility as expedition leader, to search out these places and add them to future trips. Last week, we were iced out of our visit to Columbia Glacier, here in Prince William Sound, Alaska. So we instead went to a bay adjacent to Columbia fjord, in hopes that some of that ice would be there for us to walk around and paddle around. It was super low tide, so tons of big icebergs were trapped on the rocky shore, separating the bay from the fjord. I was excited to take people back, although this time I was prepare to explore by kayak. Only four people chose to come with me, but after this wild adventure, they all thought they chose correctly. We ended up paddling over 6 miles, way up a beautif...

  Team bonding in front of Meares Glacier. It was tough work, but we finally made it to the face of a glacier. We had been iced out until now this trip. You can see the pure joy in the guests' faces as they posed for this picture. Today's adventure was one of the guests and crew favorites. We were at Meares Glacier, in northern Prince William Sound, where a massive glacier tumbles out of the tall mountains and flows into the end of a beautiful fjord. It is a rarity among glaciers these days, in that it is one of the few that is currently advancing. It is bulldozing its way through the forest, taking old trees down as it goes. It also dumps an amazing amount of ice into the fjord, which is what made this morning's kayak such an adventure.

  Water this calm is beckoning to be kayaked on. We explored all the nooks and crannies along the shoreline and ended up covering about 6.5 miles by the end of the adventure. What an adventure! Today I took our guests, aboard the expedition ship Safari Explorer, to a bay in Prince William Sound that we have never been to before. This is what expedition travel is all about. We are all exploring together. This afternoon I had planned on showing them the massive Chenega tidewater glacier, but it had dropped so much ice into Icy Bay, that getting anywhere near it was impossible. So, after studying the charts of nearby adventure options, we decided to take the boat into the neighboring Whale Bay. Whale Bay was historically a great place to see feeding humpback whales. It was a known spot for young herring fish to gather, a favorite food of the whales. However, the herring fishery collapsed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, when oil covered the normally pristine waters and shorelines...

  This is a photo of where I kayaked to in the Hule'ia river, near Lihue, Kauai. I paddle up from the ocean entrance, all the way to just past this huge ancient fish pond. The towering cliffs on one side looked like something out of a movie. In fact, they are the backdrop in several hollywood hits! Not many people know about paddling the Huleia Stream. But that is exactly what I did. Luckily, I talked to some locals in the know, who pointed me towards this hidden gem. In fact, Chris, the general manager of the Kauai Inn, brought me his kayak just so I could go check it out. I really appreciated his enabling, even though it turned out to be a tiny kayak that blew around in the wind like a paper plate. An inexperienced paddler would have turned around immediately, but not me.... up the river I went. And it was so worth it. I was slightly worried since I was getting blown up the river at a pretty good rate. There wasn't much current flowing down at all, which meant I would have to...

    This is the Alaska that I see in my mind when I close my eyes and daydream about being back there. Water, so calm that it reflects the mountains and sky. Ice filled glaciers that can be the purest form of blue I know. And rugged landscapes, totally devoid of the touch of humans. No boardwalks, no cars, no ticket booths, just wilderness. It was a picture perfect day at Northwestern Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Like most of Alaska, there was not another person around for miles. It was just our little expedition cruise ship and our thirty passengers. The water was calm, almost like a mirror, reflecting the jaw-dropping scenery of the fjord. There was much less ice floating in the water than last time, but I still had high hopes that the guests would be able to see a calving, where chunks of ice as big as buildings fall off the glacier face and crash into the water. My plan was to get everyone on either kayaks or small boats, to give them a more intimate look at the ...