Hubbard Glacier from Disappointment Inlet, Yakutat Bay, Alaska.
Hubbard Glacier descends from The Boundary Range, where Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada follow some of the highest peaks in North America. The region is bounded by huge glaciers flowing down into the Gulf of Alaska on the North Pacific Ocean.
The Hubbard Glacier descends from behind Mt. Vancouver and Mt. Seattle, entering Disappointment Inlet on Yakutat Bay. The region is on the arc of the Outside Coast, out beyond the Inside Passage, North of Glacier Bay on the way to Prince William Sound.
The immense storms of the Gulf of Alaska hit these mountains and get stopped for weeks and months at a time, being pushed upward and squeezing their moisture out as rain and snow, into glaciers.
On this particular evening, in an inflatable raft we had flown in from Juneau, we almost lost the whole game of life, and would have in a few seconds more, had we not seen the shadowed icebergs floating just below the surface. Just after this shot was taken we realized that we had drifted into an opaque field of tiny icebergs the size of jellyfish, almost invisible against the dark sea. Since 7/8ths of their mass is hidden beneath the water we might have had problems had we kept zooming on in. Their surfaces had melted into many ice needles, ready to puncture the raft.
Because we were dressed in wool pants and shirts, hipboots, and raingear against wake spray, we would not have been able to swim to shore. In that ice water we wouldn't have lasted 10 minutes. There were no other boats out that evening. We were 15-20 miles from the nearest village or fishing camp. We had seen no other boats that day.
We carefully pushed the floating menaces away from the raft, paddled backwards searching for more, until visually clear of the field of icemines, then started 'er up and slowly motored away so we could scan the dark waters in front of us on our way back to camp on the shore.
No comments:
Post a Comment