Day-3 aboard the Wonder.
Today we sail through the Tracy Arm Fjord. The fjord is named after Benjamin Franklin Tracy (US Secretary of the Navy during President Benjamin Harrison). The Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness contains a total of 653,179 acres.
Tracy Arm Fjord is part of Alaska's Fords Terror Wilderness Park. The park consists of two deep-water narrow fjords - Tracy Arm (north) and Endicott Arm (south). Both fjords are over 30 miles long and one-fifth of their area is covered in ice. During the summer, the fjords have considerable floating ice ranging from hand-sized to pieces as large as a three-story building. During the most recent glaciated period, both fjords were filled with active glaciers.
I believed we accessed the fjord via Stephens Passage and Holkham Bay. Our destination was the Sawyer Glaciers.
The Sawyer glacier is actually divided into two separate glaciers: North and South. The South Sawyer Glacier at the end of the Endicott Arm fjord can be very difficult to access, and is only visible on limited days of the year where there is good weather. The North Sawyer Glacier is the more common part that people visit, and it’s the one located at the end of Tracy Arm fjord. The glacier itself is white above ground, giving way to an incredible cobalt blue as it extends deep under the surface of the ocean.
The face of the glacier is about a half mile wide, make it easy to view from the water (you cannot access it from the land). It’s an active tidewater glacier, which means that you can often see “calving” events where a large chunk of ice breaks off and falls into the ocean below. The ice that falls off could be a small chunk or a section the size of a cruise ship, depending on the day. The ice chunks hit the water below, which reaches depths of as much as 600 feet, and also has sections of the glacier under the surface. In fact, calving events can also happen underwater, and you will see the calved chunk of ice emerge from the water like a submarine and float away.
On either side of the Tracy Arm are mountain peaks that soar to 7,000 feet above sea level.
Walked 1-Mile along Deck 4 on the jogging track with DL.
From the Archives: I raced and completed my second Pisgah Marathon on this day in 1999, completing 50km in 5:47:30. Ran the majority with the Bandit, throughout a beautiful park in New Hampshire. This was my 22nd finished marathon.
