Fjords, Whales, and Glaciers

In our trip to Alaska late June this year, we went for a boat tour at Kenai Fjords National Park. A fjord is a long, narrow arm of the sea, typically with steep, high cliffs or slopes on either side, formed by glacial erosion.

We boarded a catamaran boat that can hold more than 100 people. The tour lasted for about 5 hours and it included lunch on the boat. They also have a bar where you can order drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. Though in my opinion, alcohol and boat ride, especially if the waves are rolling, does not mix well, unless your opinion of having fun is barfing on the boat, or worse, falling overboard.

There was an indoor cabin and an open air portion of the boat. Staying in the open air deck can be very cold as the temperature was in the 30’s-40’s degree Fahrenheit plus the wind factor. During the tour, the boat on occasions did stop and everybody went out to get a better look on what we were viewing whether it was wild life creatures, or rock formations, or seascapes.

Here are some rock formations.

My son stayed outside at the bow of the boat most the the trip. He just put on his coat, sunglasses and ski face-cover and rode as if he was the “king of the world” like in the movie Titanic.

While my daughter did not do so hot. She became sea sick. However, I believed she still enjoyed the trip, she just kept the barf bag close to her.

Through the boat tour, we had sightings of orcas (killer whale) and humpback whales. We also saw sea otter, stellar sea lions and many birds, including puffins and bald eagles.

The following photos is of a mother orca and her baby swimming side by side. You may have to use your imagination, as they were barely exposed out of the water.

Below is the Loch Ness monster. Sorry, wrong continent, and wrong folklore too! This is actually a humpback whale. I know, it is a whale-of-a-story, but you just have to take my word, or the boat captain’s word for he was the one who said that it is a whale. It could have been a Loch Ness monster too, I supposed.

Pictures below are puffins, which are small sea birds that live in colonies. They arrive in this area every spring to breed. If they are good flyers, they are even better swimmers.

Here is a short video of how noisy the birds were in these rock islands. They were having a rock concert, would you say?

The main destination of the boat tour was to see glaciers. The closest we were able to get to was to the Holgate glacier, which is considered a calving glacier. Before you think that it has something to do with baby cows, it is not that.

A calving glacier is that it terminates at a body of water and sheds icebergs into the water. This process, known as calving, involves the breaking off of large pieces of ice from the glacier’s edge.

Because of calving, there were floating chunks of ice in the water which were once part of the glacier. The boat crew fished them out of the water, and they used these ice as part of the drink that they sold in the bar – so you can claim you drank glacier ice. It was for a price of course!

It would have been cool to claim that I drank these ice and now I have glacier in my veins. But my wild imagination that they might have prehistoric bacteria or organisms frozen in time that could resurrect and live inside of my body like in the movie Alien, got the better of me.

Here’s a short clip of the glacier, with the captain of the boat narrating:

I am glad to see the glaciers while they still exist. As the boat captain said, this glacier is receding and getting smaller. Who knows how long would it be before it totally dissolve into the sea, or all its ice chunks get drank by tourists.

From a glacier in Kenai Fjords,

Pinoytransplant.