Capturing the Moment

  Jumping into Unakwik Inlet like... Today we explored a wondrous place called Unakwik Inlet here in Prince William Sound, Alaska. This was the epicenter of the 1964 Good Friday earthquake. It measured 9.2 on the richtor scale, making one side of the fjord raise up 12 feet while they other side sank down. Dead trees can still be seen along the inlet on our way up to Meares glacier at the end. Meares glacier is always an exciting one to explore, because it is advancing instead of retreating, like almost all the other glaciers in the world. If you get close enough you can see where the glacier is slow motion bulldozing its way through the rainforest, knocking trees over and pushing earth in front of it as it advances. We had some guests kayaking and others exploring by small boat, but I wanted to take people on a hike to the glacier face. This is one of the most unique hikes that I've found up here in Prince William Sound. We landed on an easy rocky beach. Then we crossed a small str...

  One of my favorite photos of the day. This scene was on tripod hill, about 1,000ft up. The cloud layer was just above us, but we could see forever just underneath it. The lands now known as Cordova, Alaska were originally the home of the Eyak people. The story is that the Eyak people paddled down the mighty Copper River, then found Eyak lake stocked with beautiful red salmon. They decided to stay along the shores and never left. The Eyak people can still be found in Cordova town today, and a trip to the cultural center, Ilanka, is always high on my list of stops. Fast forward to the Spanish explorer, Salvador Fidalgo, in 1790, the current name of Cordova for the townsite has stuck. However it was the discovery of copper in Kennekott, and the need for a port to ship it from, that created the first boom for Cordova. From 1911 to 1938, 200 tons of high grade copper ore moved through the port of Cordova. The economy switched to a fishing town after the ore ran out, and it is still a ...

  View from the drone, high above our ship's anchorage on our first morning at Tiger Glacier. It feels good to be back in Alaska. After traveling through the night we felt our first piece of ice scraping down the hole before breakfast. We slowed down and pulled into a nice anchorage, a few miles from Tiger Glacier, in Icy Bay. This was Day 1 on our Prince William Sound itinerary on the Safari Explorer. While the guests were in breakfast, I sent up my drone for a few shots of our boat and the surrounding beauty. We spent the morning taking our small boats through the fjords and up to the glacier. A few giant slabs of ice calved off the face of the glacier. We rode up and down on the waves created by the icefall. I ended up picking up some of this floating ice so the guests could see it up close. We had sea otters with pups and harbor seals hauled out on the ice flows. A black bear was even spotted going in and out of the bushes, high above us on the forest covered cliffs. The advent...