We enjoyed our brief stay back in Petersburg, but we really wanted to go cruising one more time before the weather changes for the fall and winter.  Glacier Bay National Park remains our favorite place in SE Alaska so that’s where we decided to go, but not before we took care of a few maintenance items.  The last time we pulled the anchor, the salt water washdown wasn’t working very well, and it’s important to keep the chain clean when it goes back into the locker so the bilge doesn’t develop an odor.  Jim crawled into the forward bilge and discovered that the old pump was badly corroded… fortunately we had a spare.It takes a few days to get up to Glacier Bay, so we stopped in a new anchorage the first night and we liked it enough that we stayed an extra day just to kayak around and explore the protected cove.Our next stop was back to Baranof Warm Springs, with the geothermal hot spring piped into a little bath house with a great view of the waterfall.  There’s a free state dock we can tie to, and what’s not to like about a relaxing soak with a view??Heading up to Glacier Bay we got a beautiful view of the Fairweather mountain range that sits along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska.We didn’t expect to see whales since they migrate to Hawaii for the winter, but we got a happy surprise and saw several of them along the way.  Talking with the rangers at Glacier Bay National Park we learned that there are a number of younger males that  to stay up in Alaska for the winter.

We had Glacier Bay almost entirely to ourselves in mid-September, and it was very quiet.  We met with the volunteer coordinator about volunteering in the Park next summer, and we got to talk with more of the rangers and one of the Park’s law enforcement officers – such interesting people with endless stories to tell!  Caring for a Park that’s the size of Connecticut is no simple matter.We headed up into the Park and settled into a good anchorage to ride out some ugly storm fronts that were on the way.  We saw some extremely low low-pressure systems – 980 millibars looked strange on the barometer – that’s a hurricane-caliber low.  Apparently these fall weather fronts coming off the Gulf of Alaska are normally very low.  We found a comfortable spot to sit through the first front, capped by a double rainbow, and we explored the farther reaches of Muir Inlet when the weather settled down.We returned to the protected anchorage to hide from another front, and then explored up the western arm of the bay.  We were looking forward to getting close to the Johns Hopkins glacier, but the brash ice was very thick and we couldn’t find a safe path.Heading back down the bay, we stopped at a cliff called “gloomy knob” and we spotted some mountain goats along the rocks.  We were able to get close to the cliff and had a great view of the surefooted goats picking their way up and down the steep rock face.Stay tuned for more adventures from our fall trip to Glacier Bay…

After cruising over 2700 nautical miles around SE Alaska and taking a side trip up to the interior to see Denali, we finally got the chance to spend a little time in the town of Petersburg (aka “Little Norway”) where we’ll settle for the winter months.  We’ve been looking forward to exploring more of our new “back yard” and meeting people, and we were lucky to be in town for the Rainforest Festival.  A marine mammal expert from Kodiak was on hand to give a talk about Steller sea lions – appropriate since we have a healthy population in the area, and a few that always hang around in the harbor.Stellers are much larger than their cousins, the California sea lions, and the Steller males can weigh up to 2000 lbs.  Kate, a professor from the University of Alaska, gave an excellent talk about these animals, and relayed a number of great stories.  Suffice it to say that neither one of us is inclined to go diving in the harbor since the sea lions love to harass divers.

In addition to the lecture, the Festival organized a boat trip to see the Le Conte glacier – Petersburg’s “local” glacier and one of the reasons the town was originally founded here.  In the late 1800s it was very difficult to keep fish fresh to get it to market down in Seattle, but the ready supply of glacier ice solved the problem nicely and the town flourished.

The boat tour included commentary by Professor Kate so it was a rare treat to learn more about the marine mammals near the glacier – particularly the seals.The Le Conte is a difficult glacier to see since the approach has a lot of twists and turns, and it’s often choked with brash ice and bergy bits.  There is no way we could have gotten ADVENTURES in close to see the Le Conte, but the nimble jet-drive aluminum tour boat was perfect for the job.  Of course the day of the tour was foggy and it was raining hard, but since the tourist season was over and the participants were all locals, no one thought anything about the weather.  We all just dressed in our rain gear and boots, and I brought “rain coats” for my cameras.  There were lots of seals around the glacier and we enjoyed learning more about them.  They prefer the ice over any other terrain to haul out on, and they even give birth to their pups on the ice.  Here you can see the Le Conte glacier, and if you look closely you’ll see lots of little brown seals in front of the snout.The ice is so magical – it can have so many different colors, and I love the almost fake-looking turquoise blue that’s common in glacier ice.  Some ice is perfectly clear, some is white, and some is black from the grit and rock ground from the mountains as the glacier makes its way down to the sea.  The shapes and sizes boggle the mind, and I don’t get tired of looking at all the different formations.  You just have to be careful about getting too close to the bergy bits since pieces sometimes calve off, changing the center of balance and causing the ice to roll over or pop up.As we headed back towards Petersburg the clouds got darker and some of the big bergy bits really stood out against the gray sky.  Who says a rainy day can’t be a beautiful thing?