Gettin' Glacial

We took a hike/kayak trip on Saturday that was absolutely mindblowing. The photos have to be split up between the hiking portion and kayaking portion for your mental safety. Thus, here is the hiking part of our day:

(Note: The photos look like crap on here. The only way to see them correctly is double click on the ones you are interested in. It's very annoying but we don't know how to fix it.)

The hiking portion of our day was a hike to Greuwingk Glacier. We started off early in the morning and took a water taxi across the bay to the trailhead. On the ride over we saw this adorable family of otters. The pup is trying to sleep on its mother's belly.


...and this majestic eagle

This sign greeted us at the head of Glacier Spit trail
If a bear ****s in the woods...

they will probably do it on your hiking trail.
We saw a lot of bear and moose poop.
It didn't seem prudent to photograph,
but there was a lot of it.


We saw lots of beautiful flowers, kind of a running theme here.

I included this photo because I thought the eerie terrain was worth noting. You are walking through the middle of dense forest and then all of a sudden it's a sparsely vegetated area. This is because the glacier has melted so recently that things haven't had the time to grow. All of those rocks were left by the glacier, also.

There it is! Every several minutes the glacier would shift and sound like thunder. We didn't see it calve (when a piece falls off) but it was audibly melting.

A small lake of glacial water

I was able to fish out a relatively small piece of ice.

There were a lot of rocks with glacial striations
, marking the different levels of natural happenings in the area. Volcanic ash accounts for a lot of the striations in this glacier.

Glacier flowers:

(If this blog seems schizophrenic it's because we both wrote it.)