Glacier Bay National Park
Day 1 Aug 22, 2023
This is the first park that I have made a special trip to visit this year as there are no work opportunities anywhere near it for me. Not the easiest park to get to as I had to fly into Juneau, spend the night and take a ferry early the next morning. One large airline has flights into Gustavus for about two months in the summer, but I missed those by a couple weeks. I booked all the reservations about two months ago. The ferry ride was about 4 ½ hours and the water was super smooth. Hit the jackpot on nice weather the entire trip. I saw a couple whales spouting in the distance and two separate pods of white sided dolphins and later Dall’s porpoises. The ferry ride in general was beautiful as there were mountains on either side of the waterway.
When I got to the lodge, I went down to the water to find a tide pool, but the tide was coming back in. The area was slippery from mud and kelp so I stuck to the Tlingit trail. I also went on the Forest trail led by a ranger talking about the formation of the area when the glacier receded. We watched three large blue herons fly from tree to tree. Near the lodge is a humpback whale skeleton that was from a well-known female that got hit by a cruise ship in 2001. Before dinner I walked the cove waterline out to a spit of land and saw several sea otters hunting for their dinner. Before calling it a night, I went to two programs in the Huna Tribal House regarding the interconnections in Glacier Bay and how the tribal house came into being.
Day 2 Aug. 23, 2023
I had booked an all day boat tour to see the glaciers. Glacier Bay is popular with cruise lines however those large vessels cannot go in close to the glaciers like this smaller boat can. Kayaks can get the closest but are also the most dangerous from calving ice and would take a multi-day trip to get to the glaciers. The national park service boat tour seemed the logical happy medium. Today was full of sea life. Glacier bay is supposed to have about 8,000 sea otters and I think I saw every one of them including an entire raft of mamas and their babies. There were several humpback whales, a bunch of noisy sea lions and so many sea birds. I needed help with identification, but we saw pigeon guillmonts, cormorants, murre, marbled murrelet, 2 types of puffins, gulls, kikkeye, and of course bald eagles including two that were just chilling on a hunk of floating ice. We went up close to six different glaciers, two of which calved while we watched. There were hundreds of seals resting on the ice close to the face of Johns Hopkins glacier. From a distance there was also a grizzly bear catching a salmon right where a river joins the bay. The boat tour got back about 4pm which allowed me time to get in a shorter hike before dinner. I did the Barlett River trail which was forested and easy. The only animal I saw a porcupine that was climbing down a spruce tree. After dinner I went along the shore and then the Forest trail again. A harbor seal was poking its nose out of the water and the slight mistiness made the mountains look fuzzy against the sunset.
Day 3 Aug. 24, 2023
I started off the day walking the Forest Trail for the third time. At the end of the campground, I kept going on an unofficial trail and then walked back along the water line. A sea lion kept me company for a stretch and I got a fly over by a bald eagle. The ferry ride back to Juneau was quiet without anything more exciting than some jumping salmon. I am already planning a return trip to kayak and stay in the campground.
Total Cost: $1476.99
