Alaskan Cruise-Day 4-Glacier Bay

This place was just as amazing! It's a bay full of glaciers and the only way to access it is by boat. You have to have a permit to go inside and we had to pick up a ranger at the visitor center and they gave us a play by play of the area and then the other part of being able to be in there was we had to sit in front of certain glaciers for an hour and have nothing else going on on the ship so that all attention was turned to the glaciers.
Glacier Bay is "comprised of 3.3 million acres of mountains, glaciers, forests and waterways...it is one of the world's largest protected natural areas". Millions of years ago, Glacier bay was one big glacier but is now many smaller glaciers. They say that the glaciers have retreated but not necessarily because of greenhouse effect. It's mostly because they're sitting on water that is constantly moving and changing. Some of the glaciers in Glacier Bay are actually advancing!
Our first glacier to see was the Reid Glacier.



Then Lamplugh (pronounced lam-ploo)






Around this point,

they call Jawdrop Point because it opens up to the John Hopkins Glacier and the view is GORGEOUS!! We couldn't go into the area and get closer because the area was well known as a birthing ground for seals so bigger ships couldn't go in but it was still amazing!

John Hopkins Glacier




Marjerie Glacier was the coolest because it was constantly changing and even while we were there, a few pieces fell off into the water and it was like thunder!



You can see the dirty water coming out of the bottom. It's a mud river from the glacier. From rivers like this, sediment is carried out and because it stays in the water for so long for miles, the water looks very tropical.
this iceberg was covered in little birds.
Right by Marjerie (in one of the pictures to the far right it looks like mud and rock but it's the Grand Pacific Glacier and a few miles behind it is the Canadian Border. This one is not white and blue like the others because of all the mud other things that have flowed down over it.

In that area (Marjerie and Grand Pacific) the Puffin birds like to hang out. We got a picture of them but they are so small (they are smaller than I thought the bird was-and they weren't far from the boat so they weren't small because of distance) that you can only see two black dots in the water, but that is them!

We also saw a sea lion but only the head. It kept watching us but going in and out of the water.

The ranger said that Glacier Bay gets about 50 days of the whole year that the sky is clear and it's sunny and we were lucky enough to have one of those beautiful days!

As we sailed out of the bay, we saw many different pods of whale and some even put on a show for us by jumping out of the water. And then quite literally we sailed off into the sunset headed for Sitka, Alaska!