Alaska's natural world and grandeur is a special combination of superlatives seen nowhere else and not fully understood until you visit it. During our Sea Bird adventure this past week, something in coastal southeast Alaska each day seemed to be more impressive, spectacular and wonderful than the day before, even though we all thought that was not possible. Today, our last full day of our Alaskan cruise, we visited the grand and impressive twenty-two mile Tracy Arm fjord. As with all other places we have visited, this was a special place mixing life, water, time and space.
This spectacular fjord, south of Juneau, was the most breathtaking of the many we visited this week. Vertical granitic walls rising out of the water to over 2,000 feet high with countless hundreds of cascading waterfalls tumbling down from mountain peaks and snow fields. I heard it said that any one of the cascading falls would be its own state park in any other state! At the head of the fjord are two major arms of the tidal Sawyer glacier, calving ice into the fjord with a rumble, splash and surprise that mystified all of us on the Sea Bird. Arctic terns flew overhead and dipped along the top of the water in search of herring to carry back to their cliffside nests. Majestic bald eagles watched us glide past their nests atop towering Sitka spruce at the edge of Tracy Arm.
The granite and metamorphic rocks that form the side of the fjord have withstood millions of years as sentinels to time past and the full granite dome that rose from the fjord is larger than the famous Half Dome of Yosemite National Park.
Water was everywhere around us in many different forms and the Captain of the Sea Bird gave us this up close and personal view and feel of this waterfall along the edge of the fjord below the full granite dome. With water melting from the mountain glaciers and snowfields, a cascading stream pounded over granite hundreds of millions of years old until it thundered into a misty spray at our bow.
For our brief moment today in Tracy Arm, the geologic time of eons stood still in our Alaskan water wilderness. The calls of the birds, the spray of the water, and the cascading glacial ice were the only sounds to break the silence of the moment.
This spectacular fjord, south of Juneau, was the most breathtaking of the many we visited this week. Vertical granitic walls rising out of the water to over 2,000 feet high with countless hundreds of cascading waterfalls tumbling down from mountain peaks and snow fields. I heard it said that any one of the cascading falls would be its own state park in any other state! At the head of the fjord are two major arms of the tidal Sawyer glacier, calving ice into the fjord with a rumble, splash and surprise that mystified all of us on the Sea Bird. Arctic terns flew overhead and dipped along the top of the water in search of herring to carry back to their cliffside nests. Majestic bald eagles watched us glide past their nests atop towering Sitka spruce at the edge of Tracy Arm.
The granite and metamorphic rocks that form the side of the fjord have withstood millions of years as sentinels to time past and the full granite dome that rose from the fjord is larger than the famous Half Dome of Yosemite National Park.
Water was everywhere around us in many different forms and the Captain of the Sea Bird gave us this up close and personal view and feel of this waterfall along the edge of the fjord below the full granite dome. With water melting from the mountain glaciers and snowfields, a cascading stream pounded over granite hundreds of millions of years old until it thundered into a misty spray at our bow.
For our brief moment today in Tracy Arm, the geologic time of eons stood still in our Alaskan water wilderness. The calls of the birds, the spray of the water, and the cascading glacial ice were the only sounds to break the silence of the moment.
