Invictus to Alaska 2024: Five days in Glacier Bay

Today, we are in Punch Bowl Cove in Rudyerd Bay (spelling is correct).

Mount Orville in Glacier Bay - 10,400'

This post is about Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. Before we get into it we want to briefly tell you about the three nights, which we spent in Ketchikan. We planned a one-night stay but a raging storm on the coast changed that with sustained wind speeds of 30 knots and gusts to 45 knots, seas to 10 feet. One night became three. We were glad to be safe in the harbour!

The intensity of this storm brought howling winds inside the harbour, up to 21 knots, and was accompanied by extreme heavy rain and winds. A landslide just a few blocks from the harbor was triggered by the torrential rain. We could hear sirens for many hours and the power was out until late in the evening. Several houses were destroyed and tragically one person was killed, three were sent to hospital.

Here's a picture of the slide as we left Ketchikan Monday morning.

The extended stay gave us some time to organize photos for a post about our unforgettable five-day stay in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. Like Tatlayoko, Glacier Bay is best seen in-person, but failing that it takes a lot of pictures and text to even begin to describe it. If you don’t have time to dig through the text then go straight to the photos and enjoy.

Glacier Bay is the terminus of our travels this summer. Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve was established in 1925 and is really big. Together, the park and preserve total 3,284,500 acres or 5220 square miles, about the size of Connecticut. But it also forms part of a much bigger World Heritage Site encompassing more than 24 million acres, one of the largest protected areas in the world, which includes parts of Canada. Here's a Glacier Bay fact sheet if you want more details.

This re-articulated whale skeleton at park headquarters in Bartlett Cove was pretty cool.

Our impressions of Glacier Bay: Nature writ large, grand scale landscapes, whales, sea otters, birds birds birds, bears, seals, mountains, glaciers, ‘bergs, climate change, and especially the opportunity to see geomorphology in action.

A really big coastal Cedar or Douglas fir tree, a mountain, an ocean, a tectonic plate, the sun: all really big things that remind us of how small and insignificant we are. Well, we are going to add Glacier Bay National Park to that list. We marveled at how small we are.

We took too many photos of course. It's been tough sorting through them to pick a selection without having too many. I hope we cut that fine line here. There are 56 photos and videos in this post.

Sea otters were everywhere. We saw 100's of them while on our way into Bartlett Cove and throughout the park.

Roma has always wanted to see a puffin! This one is a crested puffin.

Common murre

We are so glad we came... and fortunate. Access to the main part of the bay is limited to 25 pleasure boats at a time (not including cruise ships). The permits are ‘first come, first served’, are good for a maximum of 4 nights/five days, hard to get, and most boaters apply a year in advance. A few of the permits are reserved for short-notice applicants and these are even harder to get. Since we are both optimists and weren’t exactly sure when we would be there, we decided to take a chance by applying for a short-notice permit a few days ahead of our arrival.

Optimism aside, that did not work. We were very disappointed when our application was turned down. The next morning, I decided to apply once more just in case there was a no-show or a cancellation. Two hours later we checked our email (thank you Elon) and were so pleased to have received a permit.

We had to wait three days for the start of our permit period so we cruised into Dundas Bay, which is part of the park but does not require a permit. We did a post on Dundas Bay in July but here are a couple of other photos of that place.

Dundas Bay was characterized by huge mud flats that bared at low tide.

That's Invictus at anchor in the background.

There are strict rules for boaters in the bay designed to protect wildlife and to preserve the wilderness feel of the park. To enter or leave the park you must check-in by VHF radio before you cross the park boundary. If your permit is not active yet, a transit permit is issued that allows you to get to the park headquarters in Bartlett Cove, where you must take an orientation course from a park ranger. The ranger describes restricted areas, explains the rules that protect whales and other wildlife, and advises of the dangers you may face.

Our first couple of days in the park were foggy, cloudy, rainy and cool, which is typical of this climate.

A large number of brown bears (grizzly) live in the park.

Floating ice provides important sanctuary for seals. Portions of the park are off limits for boaters so that the seals can birth and rear their pups on the floating ice.

Have you heard of a glacial erratic? Glaciers pick up rocks and transport them long distances before they get dropped. This one is on its way to...? The berg looks a bit rotten so the rock is probably close to its final resting spot.

The next three photos are of a cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth, that we came across in Tarr Inlet. Despite the fog we could see each other on AIS. The ship called us on the radio asking whether we could see anything. We replied that we could see them just fine but they seemed to be dragging along their own personal fog bank. Pretty funny. Check out all the passengers on the bow in the third picture.