If you thought about cruising through the Inside Passage up to Southeast Alaska this year that idea may not float.
Of course, you need not hop aboard a cruise ship to travel from the “Lower 48” to “Southeast” as the Alaska Panhandle is known to its residents.
According to the Glacier Bay National Park Website,
“When Captain George Vancouver charted adjacent waters of Icy Strait in 1794, he and his crew described what we now call Glacier Bay as just a small five-mile indent in a gigantic glacier that stretched off to the horizon. That massive glacier was more than 4,000 feet thick in places, up to 20 miles wide, and extended more than 100 miles to the St. Elias mountain range.
“By 1879, however, naturalist John Muir discovered that the ice had retreated more than 30 miles forming an actual bay.
“By 1916, the Grand Pacific Glacier – the main glacier credited with carving the bay – had melted back 60 miles to the head of what is now Tarr Inlet.”
Modern-day visitors to the park can sail far up into the bay, either in their own craft, on a cruise ship, or a park concessionaire tour boat, and get fairly “up close and personal” with the remaining glaciers.
But not everything at Glacier Bay worth seeing and photographing is made of ice.
Southeast Alaska is one of the most remote places where one could live in the United States.
No roads connect its few towns, which are scattered wide apart over 35,000 square miles of mountains, forests, glaciers and sea.
Should you move there to permanently live, or merely pay it a brief visit on vacation?
That’s the question posed by following short film which I produced and which aired last month on local TV in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.
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