This is a RAIN FOREST!

The sea is calm. It is time for kayaking. My usual four shirt, two trouser combo covered with PFD and kayaking skirt and we are being pushed off the back of the ship into the chilly damp landscape of Scenery Cove in Thomas Bay. Like children playing, we are given two points in the bay that we may not go beyond. Within minutes we saw a large bald eagle sitting at the top of a tree. Moving on we quickly spotted a second eagle. The shoreline is densely covered with trees and huge boulders that extend into the water leaving no room for a beach. For two hours we paddled around the bay hugging the shore, with a seal bobbing to the surface several times nearby as we returned to the ship. The last fifteen minutes resembled a trip under a good shower head.

 

Afternoon had another skiff load of us hunkered down in icy rain as we zoomed at high speed to get across some fast flowing ice-melt rapids towards Baird Glacier; a completely different glacial formation compared with Sawyer earlier in the week, since Baird neither reached the waterline nor extended below ground level, and the leading edge had broken and receded significantly in the last few years. Nevertheless, it was still a vast expanse which extended some 25 miles beyond where we would hike. Our landing stage for this adventure had been pre-described as toaster-sized or microwave-sized or any larger kitchen appliance-sized boulders, all of them slippery to clamber across before we could reach the flatter surfaces of the moraine to hike towards the glacier. Dozens and dozens of arctic terns squawked and swooped aggressively over our heads, defending their nesting grounds. As we approached, the leading edge of the glacier had the appearance of moonscape, the predominant colour mid-grey rather than white or blue, with large areas having the texture of a grey sandy beach even though we were informed that much of it was actually frozen. Closer still and a number of melt pools contained bus-sized chunks of what looked like demolished concrete which were actually a frozen mix of glacial ice and the huge rocks and boulders the glacier had transported hundreds or thousands of miles over the eons. Even the flatter areas like small islands that we could walk on had the appearance of concrete slabs because of all the embedded rocks and stones.

 

Our conga line of multi-coloured Goretex-clad hikers snaked across the ice beside the ice pools and back over the huge moraines with numerous plants growing from them as the first stage of new forests. Clambering over the boulders cold and wet we made our way back to our skiff for another damp and chilly sprint back to the mothership.

 

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