{"id":9392,"date":"2011-09-08T01:55:03","date_gmt":"2011-09-08T08:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cruisingdoneright.com\/?p=9392"},"modified":"2011-09-08T01:55:03","modified_gmt":"2011-09-08T08:55:03","slug":"alaskas-memorable-first-glacier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/?p=9392","title":{"rendered":"Alaska's Memorable First Glacier"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>KENAI FJORDS, Alaska \u2014 It was our first time. Never before had we seen a glacier. All that you need to know about it is that we took 202 pictures. Okay, maybe they weren’t ALL of the glacier and, yes, there are other firsts in our lives that fortunately weren’t recorded by 202 photos. Or even one. But we’re not going to go there, are we?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This massive assemblage of ice that you’re looking at through our camera lens is called the Aialik Glacier. It has been here, just outside Resurrection Bay on the southern shores of mainland Alaska<\/a>, since the beginning of time, or at least a few thousand years, whichever came first. Apparently, like all glaciers of its lineage, it “calves” and it’s too bad nobody was around to photograph the first time that happened. Calving means it makes a lot of noise and it moves, but not so quickly that you can’t get out of the way.<\/p>\n

For those of us taking a six-hour boat ride in the rain (and did we say it was cold?), this was the jewel at the end of the fjord…the pot at the end of the rainbow. It was a positively miserable Alaska day (one Alaskan was heard to call it typical) and that was too bad for the nice people who arranged the Kenai Fjords Tour that Princess<\/a> passengers have twice voted their favorite Alaska shore excursion. On the other hand, nobody but your favorite meterologist gets credit for the sunshine nor blame for the storms.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>None of this seemed to bother the humpback whales or the puffins (Alaska’s state bird) or the bald eagle that strutted his stuff at the top of a mooring as the Aialik Explorer \u2014 that’s the boat, not the discoverer of the glacier \u2014 sailed by. The inhabits of this part of Alaska’s wilderness were out in full force, basking in the breeze, rambling in the rain and posing for the photographers.<\/p>\n

All of them, and more, were identified by Captain Chris Overbeck, whom every visitor to the fjords should have on the bridge of the boat that takes you there. He is articulate and knowledgeable, and he delivers it all with a soothing voice that almost makes you forget it’s pouring. We stopped counting when he identified the 79th species of the Fjords, a list which included some that we were at least vaguely familiar with…like sea lions and seagulls.<\/p>\n

Actually, we’re not sure if they were sea lions or sea otters, because our notes were a little smudged…and do you know the difference. Maybe we saw both. We also saw two kinds of \"\"<\/a>puffins, or at least one that we hadn’t seen before (horned and tufted), which left us wondering if they have equal status with the state officials who picked them as Alaska’s bird. As you might expect in a land that is more wild than it is \"\"<\/a>human, the puffin overcame tremendous odds given the number of birds that share the water and the trees.<\/p>\n

The whales are called humpbacks, Pacific humpbacks actually, and we spotted a couple of them \u2014 tails up as they disappeared into the depths for another mouthful of fish. The humpbacks are soon headed for Hawaii, so now we know why they say whales are the brightest mammals in the ocean.<\/p>\n

Not so bright, the seagulls. They’re just as messy at sea as they are in your local park, and you can only imagine what the environmentalists would do if that was us.<\/p>\n

Yet when all was said and done, the tour was all about the glacier, all cracking and falling and becoming little ice floes that a flotilla of kayakers had to paddle around. Good \"\"<\/a>question, who goes kayaking in the rain to dodge ice floes? In this case, 10 people who were too far away to ask.<\/p>\n

Aialik?<\/p>\n

That’s eye-AL-lick, which means…well, does it really matter? To us, it means awesome…but then, it was our first time.<\/p>\n

For more on our Alaska adventure, check our colleague Phil Reimer’s blog at Ports and Bows<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KENAI FJORDS, Alaska \u2014 It was our first time. Never before had we seen a glacier. All that you need to know about it is that we took 202 pictures. Okay, maybe they weren’t ALL of the glacier and, yes, there are other firsts in our lives that fortunately weren’t recorded by 202 photos. Or… Continue reading Alaska's Memorable First Glacier<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,31,36,15],"tags":[45,51,35,2208,64,93],"class_list":["post-9392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-ports","category-reviews","category-stories","tag-alaska","tag-cruise-ports","tag-cruises","tag-ports","tag-princess-cruise","tag-shore-excursions","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}