Saturday 19th of July. Glacier bay, wilderness or tourist machine?

Both actually.

As this is written in the evening in “Blue Mouse cove“, we sit here looking at five boats anchored in the cove. Add to that two huge cruise ships and maybe a handful of smaller cruise/tourist boats, and we haven’t paddled a stroke without line of sight to tourist activities.

This is the least remote place we have been to since leaving Sitka, except obviously for Elfin Cove. Close to 800 000 visit Glacier Bay each year. 90% of them in cruise ships. The Rangers are here to protect and enforce minimum impact.

There is a reason for this tourist activity . The landscape is stunning. A deep fjord surrounded by snow capped mountains. And the biotope is becoming “high mountain at sea level”. What used to grow line green meadows at four to five hundred metres above sea level and with an intervening band of spruce and hemlock, is now growing at the shoreline. Further north there are still a couple of glacier that reach all the way into the fjords.

We have also seen intrastadial tree trunks sticking out of the gravel on the shoreline. These are the remains of trees that grew before the last glaciatiaon of the area and somehow escaped total destruction by the ice during glaciation.

So it is rough here. And more barren. We have seen only a few sea otters and only one whale. Fewer eagles as well, but more gulls. Mostly “krykkje”

Also one bear walking leisurely along the shore across the bay as we were having morning coffee (bear number seven).

If you look a bit there is traces of bear everywhere on land. At last night’s campsite, at the lunch stop and at tonight’s campsite. But no alarm last night and no one had touched the boats.

Tomorrow we plan to explore one of the areas where motorboats are not allowed at all.