Can you name 26 Glaciers?

The weather today has been cool, wet, and windy. This is the same storm that canceled our bear viewing.

Today we took a boat excursion into Prince William Sound. The tour was called the 26 Glacier cruise. There were 26 glaciers, but we didn’t see all of them either because of the cloud cover or because they were too high. Still, we saw a lot of glaciers. And we saw some wildlife along the way.

The tour pamphlet had a list of animals that we might see. On our Alaska adventure, we have seen most of the animals listed except the last one, the Sasquatch! The pamphlet instructed us to let the crew know if we saw one. We regret to inform you that nobody saw a Sasquatch on our tour.

Before we reached the glaciers, we saw several rafts of sea otters. The captain said that sea otters are not as timid when they are grouped together in a raft, which was true today: the otters were not afraid of the large tour boat.

The first set of glaciers were called the CBC glaciers, the Cascade, Barry, and Cox. These were really impressive because they were so close to each other, which you can see in one of the photos below.

Then we headed into College Fjord, so named because the glaciers along the fjord were named after prestigious universities. The highlight of the college fjord glaciers was the Harvard Glacier. Amy kept calling it the Harvard of glaciers. Greg was disappointed that the Yale Glacier was barely visible due to the clouds. And sorry Adam, there is no Princeton Glacier in Prince William Sound. According to the captain, the Harriman expedition which named the glaciers, had a vendetta against Princeton.

The Harvard glacier was truly impressive. It is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long and 25 miles (40 km) deep. We heard it calve but were not able to see it. There were many icebergs in the water below. The boat stopped to pickup some small icebergs, which were shown to the passengers. Pieces of ice were also available in the ship's bar as Glacier Margaritas. (Yes, seriously. And no, we didn't get one.)

On the way back we passed through the Esther Passage, with forest on both sides. We saw a sea lion rookery. We have become a bit jaded because it was smaller than other rookeries that we have seen on this trip.

The Exxon Valdez accident happened closer to the town of Valdez, so we were not in that area. However, the captain told us that the halibut population has not yet fully recovered from the disaster.

We got off the boat and the wind picked up again with driving rain. We are spending our evening comfortably in our RV with the heat running (luckily it is working well today!)