It takes a long time to get up to the head end of Glacier Bay, and M/V Thankful is taking a couple of days to get the job done. We spent most of yesterday working at it, passing Stellar sea lion covered islets, hanging glaciers, and a couple of cruise ships headed in the other direction. As we got deeper into the bay, the waterway narrowed and the surrounding mountains got higher.
Ice bergs started to appear, and we corralled one to harvest ice from for our after dinner cocktails. Nothing compares to a glacier ice cooled cocktail.
Our destination for the day was Reid Inlet, a small bay on the side of the fjord. This ice carved bay has a large glacier of the same name sitting at the head end, and after getting Thankful anchored the crew piled into the dinghy to have a look.
Size and distance are very difficult to judge here. From Thankful the glacier looked like it was a half mile or so away. We powered in the dinghy for at least a mile, and after landing had to walk at least another half mile to reach the glacier's face. From there Thankful was just an unrecognizable spec on the horizon.
The glacier didn't move as we goofed around beside it, but it did drop the rocks it carried a few times a minute and they splashed into the stream running beneath it. After we turned around and headed back to the boat we heard a loud crack as some part of the glacier shifted.
The tide had been falling during the hour that the Thankful crew was ashore, and as we headed back to the dinghy Lori discovered the tracks of a very large bear in the glacial silt headed in the same direction.
Of course, panic ensued and all eyes searched for the bear which we were sure was nearby. When order was restored to the now fully alert crew, Vicki noticed that there were also human footprints that none of us had made in the cement-like silt near the bear tracks. We were the only people in the bay, so the footprints, human definitely and bear probably, weren't new. This area was submerged when we went ashore so we hadn't seen the prints earlier.
Back aboard Thankful, the crew celebrating cheating death one more time over glacier ice cooled cocktails, and they were good.
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