Our Glacier Bay trip was everything you’d expect I would write—a beautiful yacht with a great crew and national park tour operator permits for entry, a super fun group of seven photographers, great food prepared by our “personal” chef, amazing wildlife, beautiful wilderness landscapes and interesting, varied and photogenic weather. Simply put, it was great!
Nearly 700,000 people will visit Glacier Bay National Park by cruise ship this year. Only two ships can enter the park each day and their travel is restricted. Many will embark from Seattle on Puget Sound—and I can distantly see them coming and going from my living room located across from the city on Vashon Island.
These ships are behemoths, and I had never been so close to them. The ship pictured below carries more than 2000 passengers with a crew of more than 1000. And, truthfully, I enjoyed photographing them—but I’d never, ever, want to travel on one. Most of the outside deck space is many stories up from the water on the top deck of the ship—most six or more decks up. Individual cabin outside space is comprised of little balconies that look like a huge ice cube tray turned on its side. From the ship, seabirds and eagles look like tiny specks (if you have binoculars) and whales like tiny black fish with a waterspout. The closeup website and brochure photos of wildlife used by these cruise lines come from stock photos created by individual professional nature photographers, alone, or on trips like mine. Not from a cruise ship.
We, on the other hand, enjoyed great up-close-and-personal and near water-level shots of wildlife and landscapes both in the national park and the adjacent waters of Tongass National Forest. Close approach of marine mammals is forbidden in the national park, so our whale shots were attained outside the park in the Inside Passage. The high summer-season cost of one of these cruise ship voyages with a day in the park is about half or two-thirds of what our trip costs. It would include a nice cabin, maybe a climbing wall, and your choice of two dozen restaurants. You can go ashore to buy diamond jewelry, smoked salmon, or ride a “zipline.” And judging by the incredible popularity of cruise ships, for most vacationing travelers a cruise ship is great. But if you are a serious nature photographer, it probably is not. Overheard in Juneau: “We heard our ship saw a bear!” “We didn’t.”
Within this text are some wildlife images, all shot from our boat, that you couldn’t possibly get from a cruise ship.
Our trip started from Auke Bay in Juneau at the end of July. On our first day we photographed the Point Retreat Lighthouse, a small pod of orcas, various humpback whales and a cooperative sea otter in Icy Strait. We anchored for the “night” in the solitude of Flynn Cove. Our typical day ended with a great dinner and lots of wine.
Next day found us off Point Adolphus surrounded by humpbacks with one exuberantly “lob-tailing” in the fog. Point Adolphus is the same location our “Whales, Wildlife and Wilderness, Alaska” voyage found them a few weeks earlier and where we were to see numerous “bubble-netting” humpbacks a few days later.
By mid-morning we entered Glacier Bay National Park and did our requisite check-in after passing rafts of sea otters and numerous marbled murrelets. The murrelets, little brown seabirds related to puffins, are endangered through much of the southern part of their range due to habitat destruction of the old-growth coniferous forests in which they nest. In Glacier Bay there are still lots of them.
The highlight of the day was our visit to the water off South Marble Island which is a rocky haul-out for Steller’s sea lions and a small breeding colony of horned and tufted puffins, common murres, black-legged kittiwakes, and pelagic cormorants.
We photographed Reid Glacier and anchored nearby in Reid Inlet for the night.
Our last full day in the national park started with a cool glacier breeze, glass-calm water and high overcast sky. We were underway to Margerie Glacier, passing intriguing mist-swirled mountain rainforest landscapes. An eagle on an iceberg was our photographic highlight as well as the glacier itself.
Later that afternoon we anchored off Lamplugh Glacier where we went ashore and photographed ice chunks and glacial landscapes on a mudflat outwash at the foot of the receding glacier.
Then we visited Johns Hopkins Glacier where we drifted through dinnertime and then headed back to our familiar anchorage at Reid Inlet for the night.
We didn’t get far the next morning until we found a large coastal brown bear feeding on cow parsnip roots amidst pink-blooming fireweed which delighted us with its hind-legs stand along the shore. With a telephoto lens it was easy to “shoot” and something you could never accomplish from a gargantuan cruise ship. We photographed a few other bears, but none as nicely as this one.
We were slowly making our way out of the park as we passed Gloomy Knob and were pleased to find at least a half dozen mountain goats—a few down low and close to water level and easily photographable from the boat. One nanny was resting on a low ledge when her kid descended from a bit higher up to see if it could roust her for a nursing session. It failed.
Our last stop was again at South Marble Island for puffins and sea lions. Who can resist puffins?
Then, out of Glacier Bay, we anchored in Neka Bay for the night.
Next day we were cruising the coastline taking pot shots of landscapes until we encountered a pod of humpbacks lunge-feeding off Point Adolphus. Here we had lots of time capturing the classic whale tail shots.
As we drifted some came quite close to the boat where you could smell their fishy breath as they passed. There were lots of whale watch boats around us from the nearby Tlingit community of Hoonah, the largest Tlingit village in southeast Alaska. We were also joined (at a respectful distance) by a massive 264-passenger cruise ship, Le Soleal. I was glad to be on a smaller boat.
Then the whales started feeding on herring using their unique bubble-net feeding technique of surrounding a tight ball of herring with bubbles from their blowholes and then lunging through them, mouths agape, in an amazing example of animal cooperation. We had a great photo session!
We stayed with the whales until the feeding group disbanded and then we hid in sheltered Flynn Cove for the night, expecting bad weather conditions (which never came).
A light rain greeted us in the morning as we “pulled the hook.” We were alone—not another boat nearby—when we came upon another group of 14 bubble-netters that we had to ourselves for more than an hour until we were joined by another boat. We stayed with them for several hours until late afternoon. They are really fun to shoot!
Our last destination was the Pavlof waterfall. A light drizzle was falling but about half of us went ashore to photograph three young brown bears unsuccessfully trying to catch migrating pink salmon at the base of the falls.
Anchorage was behind Couverden Island. It was flat calm with lots of surf and white-winged scoters and a few pigeon guillemots in the sheltered cove.
Next morning, back to Juneau. The full trip photos (top right of this report) have the wildlife photos followed by shots of Juneau with its totem poles, sculptures and cruise industry. What a great trip!
This could have been the “Trip from Hell” for me. During the week prior to departure, I was experiencing a moderate toothache that I thought would go away on its own. As I was sitting at the gate at SeaTac airport waiting for my flight it suddenly got really bad. My head felt like it was going to explode. What to do?
I called the boat owner in Juneau to recommend a dentist. I thought I could probably get a shot to ease the pain before spending a week on a boat in the Tongass wilderness. I called his dentist who said he could see me in a week!
That was not going to work, and I debated what to do. A woman from Juneau sitting next to me and was overhearing that conversation said, “I have a very good dentist I can recommend.” I took his number, thanked her, and called his office.
His receptionist asked for the details about my predicament and flight arrival time. She said he would rearrange his schedule so he could see me after I landed. That was an unbelievable stroke of luck. What a generous thing to do for a stranger! What a lucky string of circumstances to make this work instead of getting on the boat for a week of misery!
I landed, collected my luggage, and went straight to his office and had a ROOT CANAL. Ugh!
