Travelers' Tales Alaska by Bill Sherwonit Page A

predictably, the snow was being driven horizontally by the wind. Worse, it was falling as corn snow, which consists entirely of exceedingly hard little pellets, so the situation was rather like being sandblasted with crushed ice.
    The few tourists on the deck of the boat regarded me with that somber homage our society pays to the visibly deranged, which is to say they were pretty much doubled over laughing. So the boat pulled away, and I was left alone on a gravel bank, unable to see more than fifteen feet in any direction and feeling quite sorry for myself, when Paul Dix came paddling out of the ice storm and greeted me with a hearty “Where in hell’s the food?”
    T ourism in Glacier Bay is nothing new, explains Karen Jettmar, author of Alaska’s Glacier Bay. Inspired by John Muir’s descriptions of ice-lined fjords, tourists began arriving by steamer in 1883. By the turn of the century, steamships had carried 25,000 visitors to Glacier Bay.
    â€”Andromeda Romano-Lax
    We sat in the tent, and Paul filled me in on his adventures to date. There were Alaskan brown bears all over, which were like the grizzlies we were familiar with from Yellowstone, only bigger. Yesterday Paul had paddled into a sandy cove, looking for a place to camp. A bear had recently padded across the beach, and Paul was measuring his own foot (diminutive and pitiable) against one of the prints (colossal and appalling) when he noticed that the bear had left something else on the beach. What it had left wouldn’t fit in a gallon pail and was still steaming. Paul decided to paddle on.
    â€œGood thing you weren’t carrying any food,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” Paul replied pointedly, “I sure was lucky.”
    In fact, we were lucky. The next day dawned clear. The sky was cobalt blue, there was not a breath of wind, and the sea was like glass, a mirror to the sky and the mountains on either end of the inlet, which was about a mile wide in that spot. We paddled over the reflections of snowcapped peaks on our wayto Muir Glacier, as the sun shone and the temperature rose to a little over seventy degrees, which is about as warm as it ever gets in Glacier Bay.
    And then, there in front of us, was the glacier, pouring off the mountain and into the sea. The enormous wall of ice, the terminus of the glacier is called the snout, and this one looked to be about 200 feet high and maybe a mile across.
    The whole of Glacier Bay is shaped a little like a horseshoe, open end toward the ocean, with the inland section surrounded by mountains. Snow falls in the upper elevations, never melts, is compressed by the next year’s snow, and the next decade’s, until it turns into heavy, dense ice that flows downhill, as all water must. The ice makes pretty good time, too, sweeping down to the sea at the rate of two to five feet per day.
    The snout is subject to tides that rise and fall as much as twenty feet, eating away at the base of the glacier so that great slabs of it “calve” off the main body and crash into the ocean in an explosion of spray. The sound of the glacier calving can be heard for miles, and the mountain across the inlet from Muir Glacier is called White Thunder Ridge.
    Paul and I camped on a gravel slope below White Thunder Ridge, and we might have gotten some sleep except for the damn Northern Lights, which arced across an ebony star field like phosphorescent green smoke interspersed with dozens of red lightning bolts running in ultraslow motion. All the while the sound of calving ice rumbled off the ridge above. It was like having the whole New York Philharmonic come over to play Beethoven for you at midnight: The mindless and ungrateful go to sleep so they can rise fully rested and spiritually impoverished.
    For the next few days, Paul and I played chicken with the glacier. Kayakers are cautioned to stay at least half a mile fromthe snout, but distances were impossible to calculate. I’d get in there,