Glacier Bay National Park
Today was a day for colors and scales. The morning began as a monochrome of gray lowering clouds over a slate gray sea, broken at 6:30am by the dark outline of a single sea otter lounging on his back, preening off the port bow. An occasional shred of white snow appeared through the clouds. The flat water reflected the diffuse gray light; at times a pale gray green showed the presence of glacial till flowing past us from the central arm of the bay.
As we came in sight of South Marble Island, the monochrome of the morning started to break up into new and brighter hues. First, the puffins – small black forms in the water, with outrageous orange bills and yellow fashion plumes extending backwards from both sides of their heads. Then a new variation on the gray palette, as hundreds of black pelagic cormorants and black-legged kittiwakes dominated the rocks. As we rounded the side of the gray rocks, a Steller's sea lion haul out presented us with a concentrated caucus of brown, cinnamon, and gold against the gray rocks. We stopped briefly at Sandy Cove where a single, glossy black form browsed lazily in tall green grass just off the shingle. It was our first bear sighting of the trip.
Cream colors came into the palette in the form of distant mountain goats against the gray shale cliffs on the way to Marjerie Glacier. These were then upstaged by the true sunset gold of a grizzly sow and her darker cub gamboling on the scree slopes.
At the Majerie Glacier the gray scale changed to blue. The face of 21 miles of ice, with sheer cliffs and blue white pinnacles dwarfing the small fishing boats pulled up in awe in the nearby bay. On the cliffs south of the glacier mouth, thousands of black-legged kittiwakes chanted, and horned puffins bounced along the blue green water as if chasing their orange bills.
As the Sea Lion drifted south to drop off 'our' Park Ranger, Beth Brindle, at Bartlett's Cove, the sun burned through remaining shreds of clouds, and the day's changing monochrome gave way to a full symphony of color. The peak of the afternoon showed a full horizon-to-horizon rainbow to the south that extended on the shining water into a circle that would not be broken. On the bow, we formed a human rainbow to celebrate the wondrous colors that day's end had brought our way.
