LeConte Glacier

After church this afternoon, as we were getting ready to have lunch, we got a call inviting us to go out on the boat to view the LeConte Glacier. It's about 25 miles southeast from Petersburg.

We changed into some warmer gear and headed off to the harbor. The waters were quite choppy on the way there. The boat was bouncing up and down. Along the way, we saw a few icebergs floating about. Once we got into the bay, there were icebergs, small and large everywhere. The trick was to get through without crashing hard into them. The boat is able to glide over the small ice floes, but we did not want to hit any of the larger ones (note that only 1/8th of the iceberg is visible above the surface).

The day was mostly rainy and wet. But as we rounded the final corner to get our first look at the glacier, for just a brief moment there was a bit of blue sky and sunshine.

Our first attempt to approach the glacier ended up being blocked. So we backtracked up a bit, and a couple of us (I wasn't personally involved) used oars to row the boat around the ice and push away the larger ones to try to get the boat situated on the other side of the bay to try to make an attempt to approach the glacier that way. This attempt eventually succeeded. While paddling about, we saw a large number of seals, probably wondering what we were doing in their ice...

We finally made it to about a mile from the edge of the glacier. This is where we stopped to spend quite some time just watching the glacier and the surrounding area. We saw quite a number icebergs being calved away from the glacier.

There is tremendous power unleashed when a large hunk of ice breaks off and drops into the water. We didn't experience any that required us to make a quick getaway, but there were a couple that results in large swells - 2 to 3 feet in an otherwise calm bay.

Here are a few photos from our outing. Click on the contact sheet to go to the image gallery.

And here's a 1-minute video from the trip. The quality isn't that great since it was taken using my little snapshot digital camera. It's a taste of what you can see in Southeast Alaska. You'll just have to come here to see all this in person. There are five segments: Our trip in, glacier and seals, padding about the floes, calving ice, and trip back.

Click HERE for video. The file is just under 1MB in size. The bit rate is about 100 Kbps. You might want to right-click and "Save Target As..." to your local disk if you're on a slower connection.