Tuesday, July 13, 2010

face to face with a glacier

There are a few glaciers in the prince William Sound and we visited some of them.
When you look at them from afar, they look like a whitish mass between the mountains, not too impressive and not too big. The distance is deceptive, I guess the clean air also makes things look closer than they are.




But when you get up close up , the reality changes in an instant.



First you have to get through all the ice. As the glacier calves, the ice forms a large white area and sometimes is so tight that you cant get through. We found that one icebreaker in front will allow the rest of the party to follow in his path in single file, but if you wait too long the path quickly closes up and then you have to fight the ice again


 The ice is also a place for seals to lay about on, you can see them just lying around, sometimes they pop up in the water, have a curious look at us in our kayaks and then dive underwater again.


We were lucky to have good weather allowing us to spend a morning in the shadow of the glacier, not like the last trip where it was so cold that they spent a very short time here and then got out as fast as they could .

The colors of the ice attests to the age of the ice, blue being one of the oldest.

You can tell that you are in the vicinity of the glaciers when you start to meet ice floating along in the sea


These are some of Racheli`s photos, she had a real camera on the trip, a Nikon D40X with a 200mm lens which she kept in a waterproof box on her foredeck. Luckily the water was flat and calm all the time thus minimising the danger of getting it wet.

2 comments:

Rachel Einav said...

Was it so blue or its looks so in your eyes?

Unknown said...

No it was not so blue, I just exaggerated it a bit for effect.