LeConte Glacier to Petersburg
We awoke this morning to a very rare sight—the front face of LeConte Glacier. This is a place that has been visited by our ship only once or twice in the past ten years because the glacier has been furiously calving, filling its fjord with impassable ice. However, for the past few days the glacier stabilized enough for us to zigzag our way up through icebergs to our position, surrounded by soaring granite walls and blue ice. Certainly the calving has not ceased, as we witnessed several large masses of ice thundering into the sea. Water also thundered down in falls from cirque glaciers out of sight high in the mountains above us. We were able to approach one of these in our Zodiacs, close enough to see an American dipper working the furious waters for some kind of breakfast.
Our next stop was Petersburg. This is an absolutely genuine Alaskan fishing village, mostly unaffected by the rampant tourism that has totally changed many other towns in SE Alaska. Walking through town we discovered that most of the residents wear their boots everywhere. Their favorite brand, Xtra-tuf, can be immediately identified by its dark olive-green color. While in Petersburg, we also had a lot of other educational options. Some of us did a seaplane tour with a birds-eye perspective of the same mountains that had loomed skyward above us from the Sea Bird in LeConte fjord. Before flights were cancelled due to thunder and lightning in the afternoon, a few of us got to actually land in a helicopter on the Patterson glacier. For many, the feature attraction was the peatland bog on the Petersburg Creek trail. We took a Zodiac through a dense concentration of seabirds in the Wrangell Narrows to the head of the trail, which was mainly on a boardwalk constructed as part of the Tongass National Forest plan to expend logging revenues on public recreation. The highlight of the peatland was a plant, euphemistically called a sundew, that traps small insects and secretes an enzyme that digests their bodies and extracts the nitrogen that is the purpose of the whole carnivorous process. We also examined Labrador Tea that contains a narcotic called ledol, extracted into the tea water that will make you very mellow, unless you overbrew. Then the ledol will make you sleep for a long time. Do not mistake Labrador Tea for a similar plant called Bog Rosemary that contains Andromedotoxin that could induce a permanent sleep state if brewed into a tea. No sleepy people were among Bryan’s group of exercise hikers that launched an assault on Petersburg Mountain. They didn’t make it to the top, but they certainly got an aerobic burn that should provide some satisfaction at least until tomorrow.We closed out the day with a very amusing demonstration of crab-eating methods by our Hotel Manager, Judy Blewitt. Then we moved into the dining room to exercise our own crab-carnage techniques. The devastation was so extensive the kitchen staff decided to serve desert in the lounge.
Tomorrow we head north towards the Iyoukeen Peninsula and Freshwater Bay, where we hope to find marine mammals with eating habits at least as voracious as those displayed at dinner tonight.
We awoke this morning to a very rare sight—the front face of LeConte Glacier. This is a place that has been visited by our ship only once or twice in the past ten years because the glacier has been furiously calving, filling its fjord with impassable ice. However, for the past few days the glacier stabilized enough for us to zigzag our way up through icebergs to our position, surrounded by soaring granite walls and blue ice. Certainly the calving has not ceased, as we witnessed several large masses of ice thundering into the sea. Water also thundered down in falls from cirque glaciers out of sight high in the mountains above us. We were able to approach one of these in our Zodiacs, close enough to see an American dipper working the furious waters for some kind of breakfast.
Our next stop was Petersburg. This is an absolutely genuine Alaskan fishing village, mostly unaffected by the rampant tourism that has totally changed many other towns in SE Alaska. Walking through town we discovered that most of the residents wear their boots everywhere. Their favorite brand, Xtra-tuf, can be immediately identified by its dark olive-green color. While in Petersburg, we also had a lot of other educational options. Some of us did a seaplane tour with a birds-eye perspective of the same mountains that had loomed skyward above us from the Sea Bird in LeConte fjord. Before flights were cancelled due to thunder and lightning in the afternoon, a few of us got to actually land in a helicopter on the Patterson glacier. For many, the feature attraction was the peatland bog on the Petersburg Creek trail. We took a Zodiac through a dense concentration of seabirds in the Wrangell Narrows to the head of the trail, which was mainly on a boardwalk constructed as part of the Tongass National Forest plan to expend logging revenues on public recreation. The highlight of the peatland was a plant, euphemistically called a sundew, that traps small insects and secretes an enzyme that digests their bodies and extracts the nitrogen that is the purpose of the whole carnivorous process. We also examined Labrador Tea that contains a narcotic called ledol, extracted into the tea water that will make you very mellow, unless you overbrew. Then the ledol will make you sleep for a long time. Do not mistake Labrador Tea for a similar plant called Bog Rosemary that contains Andromedotoxin that could induce a permanent sleep state if brewed into a tea. No sleepy people were among Bryan’s group of exercise hikers that launched an assault on Petersburg Mountain. They didn’t make it to the top, but they certainly got an aerobic burn that should provide some satisfaction at least until tomorrow.We closed out the day with a very amusing demonstration of crab-eating methods by our Hotel Manager, Judy Blewitt. Then we moved into the dining room to exercise our own crab-carnage techniques. The devastation was so extensive the kitchen staff decided to serve desert in the lounge.
Tomorrow we head north towards the Iyoukeen Peninsula and Freshwater Bay, where we hope to find marine mammals with eating habits at least as voracious as those displayed at dinner tonight.
