Yakutat City and Borough

We sailed all night and all morning across the northeast corner of the open Pacific Ocean. The seas and winds were favorable, though not exactly calm. I was awakened several times over the night by that old, familiar motion of the seas aboard a ship. That ponderous movement, as she rides up to the crest of a swell, that sense of the deck moving away from you as she drops down the other side, that slight shudder as the weight of the ship encounters the next swell and her downward movement is arrested. All accompanied by the low omnipresent growl of the engines propelling you ever forward.

I found the next morning that while the motion may be familiar, my sea-legs are 20 years out of practice. It took me until mid-morning before I stopped weaving back and forth down the passageways. By lunchtime we had come close to land and entered a narrow fjord, and soon we were face-to-face with a massive wall of ice. Hubbard Glacier. We stood at the bow as the glacier emerged from the mist, the cold air sharp in our nostrils. The water was calm, clouds hung low over the snow-kissed hills. Small icebergs littered the area between us and the glacier which stood across the water like a blue-white dam, giving proof of the dynamic process that calves these bergs from their mother.Read more