Since we’re nearing the end of the season the weather has for the most part started to turn on us. We always joke that Alaska gets 363 days of rain a year, I don’t know the exact statistics but perhaps the stereotype isn’t actually too much off the mark. If so, we’ve already had our two days of sun this season (a few weeks ago I was walking around Ketchikan in shorts and a t-shirt, it felt as if I were in another dimension).
Today though, mother nature is working in our favour.
In all my seasons in Alaska, I have never seen the Glacier Bay weather quite like this. There are great tendrils of fog lying low over the water, like grasping fingertips. The kind of thing you usually see high up in the peaks that has somehow fallen to earth. If they were thicker we would be encased in white, which is not all that unusual, but as it is it feels like we’re sailing through some other world all together, somewhere in between sea and sky. Because we’re deep in the heart of Glacier Bay the water has turned a smoky green grey, the result of the glacial silt that occupies this area, so the entire landscape is a strange tri-chrome of green, white and black. It’s eerie, watching the slips of fog drift past us, partly obscuring and partly revealing everything around us. Eerie, but peaceful. Despite all the time I’ve spent here, Alaska never ceases to surprise me.
The guests occasionally complain when we get an overcast day for glacier viewing, but what we carefully explain is that they are actually lucky – overcast weather makes the glaciers look bluer. On a day like today the ice almost seems to glow from the inside out. Except for the Grand Pacific of course, which has long since stopped its forward motion and looks more like a mountain in its own right when compared to the clean blue-white expanse of the Marjory that lies right next to it.
Looking out the window at the moment you would hardly believe that it’s the middle of August.