May 29th - "Captain Lou's Icebreaker Seventh Heaven Navigates the Mouth of the Johns Hopkins and Lamplugh Glaceir Ice Pack"

Captain Lou masterfully dodged pack ice from the Johns Hopkins Glacier. Glaciers form because snowfall in the high mountains exceeds snow melt. The snowflakes first change to granular snow, round ice grains, but the accumulating weight soon presses it into solid ice. Eventually, gravity sets the ice mass flowing down slope at up to seven feet per day. The park includes some 12 tidewater glaciers that calve into the bay. The show can be spectacular. As water undermines some ice fronts great blocks of ice up to 200 feet high break loose and crash into the water. Johns Hopkins Glacier calves such volumes of ice that it is seldom possible to approach its ice cliffs closer than about two miles. Entering the channel leading up to Johns Hopkins is off limits because it is a rookery for seals.The glaciers seen here today are remnants of a general ice advance, the Little Ice Age, began about 4,000 years ago. This advance in no way approached the extent of continental glaciations during Pleistocene time.

We could see the glacier calving in the distance. Mountains reach 15,000 feet in the park. Lou and I took turns in Wings when the ice pack became too dense for Seventh Heaven to peek around the opening of the channel to the glacier.

As we advanced forward huge chunks of ice passed us. Remember, you only see the tip of the iceberg. Seventy five to eighty percent is below the water.

We advance closer to the glacier.

We saw calving up close at  the Lamplugh Glacier

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Monstrous chunks of ice cracked in a thunderous roar as they fell. Blue Ice is the most dense.