I am taking some time off and have turned the Blog over to my colleagues Bob and Nancy Dunn of Cruising Done Right. They are currently on an Alaska tour and cruise with Princess Cruises. Today’s blog is about the famous Glacier Bay.
ALASKA – What we quickly discovered about the centuries-old, ice-crusted, receding inhabitants of Glacier Bay is that they’re just like all of us…they don’t much like glacial weather either. Let’s put it another way: They don’t look their best when it’s rainy and cold.
The glacier you see here, in a photo taken from the stern of the Coral Princess, is Margerie. Yes, Margerie has seen better days, hanging around on the edge of the frigid waters of Glacier Bay. She’s hard to see in the fog and she’s even harder to see and hear when she’s “calving” — in glacial terms, she’s shedding unwanted parts — and you’re inside the ship because it’s too cold and wet to be anywhere else.
But that is the Margerie Glacier, the one passengers had the best look at during one of the most desirable cruise days in Alaska, because it shows off the glaciers. Sometimes. We’d had a taste of the area the previous day when the Hubbard Glacier came into view, but it was a short and foggy sail-past and fairly uninteresting, as glacier viewing goes. The reason there are no pictures to show you is that, frankly, Hubbard looked too much like “just another glacier.”
Right next to Margerie was the Grand Pacific Glacier. No pictures because after a while through a camera lens they do start to look alike. The one everyone wants to see in Glacier Bay is called Johns Hopkins 
Glacier and while Captain Fabio Amitrano clearly gave it a look there was just too much fog and too much (floating) ice to head down the inlet. Also rain. On the other hand, the Johns Hopkins calves such volumes of ice that you can seldom get closer than two miles from it.
“Last week, a ship made it a third of the way and had to turn back,” said Randy Thomas, one of the two National Park Rangers who boarded the Coral Princess to provide some expertise.
He and Andrew Gertge (above) hopped aboard at Sitakaday Narrows, the mouth of Glacier Bay, and they drew bigger crowds than the glaciers did. It helps when your audience can be warm and dry. It turns out there are 40 glaciers with names in this area, and dozens of unnamed “hanging” glaciers, the kind that never reach the sea.
Meanwhile, out on the part of the deck inappropriately called (on this day) The Sanctuary, you could find people looking like this while looking at glaciers. At least they could still smile from under the earmuffs and the 
blankets. Nobody, needless to say, stayed long in The Sanctuary where even coffee and hot chocolate wasn’t a strong enough antidote for glacial fever.
The day in Glacier Bay wasn’t a total write-off, but it was close, and that’s just something that can happen in Alaska at this time of year. As it turned out, the Aialik Glacier that we were within a quarter-mile of while on a small boat a week earlier in the Kenai Fjords was more impressive, and that was a rainy day, too.
Maybe Aialiks just look better in glacial weather than Margeries do.
Go to Cruising Done Right to find out about an unusual moose spotting.
