And The ADVENTURE Continues...: July 11, 2016 Boat trip to Northwest Glacier

Monday, July 11, 2016 Boat trip to Northwest Glacier

This was a 9 hr round trip through Resurrection Bay and into the open waters of the Gulf of Alaska. The day started out with clear skies and cool temperatures. As we entered the boat the smell of fresh baked cinnamon rolls hit us. What a wonderful greeting! The day started out with us stopping to check out the sea otters. They were just chillin. We continued and spotted a humpback whale but the captain was on a mission. He had heard that there was a pod of some killer whales that he wanted to get to. We did!! This is the one thing that I wanted to see. We watched these guys for at least 20 minutes and then continued on our way. We continued and saw harbor seals on ice and the stellar sea lions sunning on rocks. We saw plenty of puffins and so many different birds that nest on the islands in the bay. The next part of our trip was to look at various glaciers. Some of these were tidewater (glaciers that reach the water), piedmont (glaciers that do not reach water and forms it’s own body of water), hanging glaciers and alpine glaciers(glaciers that are in the mountains). The next highlight of our already fantastic day was reaching the Northwest Glacier. Here we stopped about 45 minutes and listened to the cracking of the glaciers and we saw it calving (ice dropping into the water). We couldn’t have asked for a better day. We were pretty tired but Jim and Terry were again leaving us so we went out to dinner on the recommendation of the crew. Thorn’s Restaurant is a local favorite. We walked in and there were shelves and glass cases filled with Jim Beam bottles that the owner has collected for over 60 years. The food was pretty good too!