Glen & Kris

College Glaciers

We toured College Fiord aboard the Klondike Express, a custom catamaran operated by Phillips Cruises and Tours out of Whittier, Alaska. The catamaran is powered by two 1,300 hp diesels turning jet drives. Top speed is over 50 knots. The day we went out was sunny with a light breeze. There are 26 glaciers along College Fiord (<a href='https://www.google.com/maps/place/College+Fiord,+Chugach+National+Forest,+Alaska+99686/@61.0788967,-147.8404521,9z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x56c831dc137aa767:0x847de3e52f538e95' target='_blank'>map</a>). Many of the glaciers were named after colleges by members of an 1899 expedition funded by railroad magnate Edward Harriman. Some glaciers - like this one - are tidewater glaciers. The ice reaches all the way to the waters of the fiord. When ice falls off the face of the glacier, it is called calving. Huge amounts of water flow underneath the glacier. You can see a torrent emerging here. The water was glassy smooth that day. Here you can see several glaciers flowing into the fiord. All the ice in the foreground has calved off the glaciers. There are one or two seals out there on the ice. Most of the air bubbles in glacier ice have been forced out by the weight of the ice above. Ice absorbs red wavelengths, so the light that is reflected back has a lot of blue in it, giving the glacier ice it's characteristic color. Another rush of water escaping from the glacier. The ice carries a lot of dirt and rock along as it grinds up the mountain beneath it. This is the east side of College Fiord. The scale of glaciers is deceiving. That flat face dropping to the water on the left is about 80 feet tall. The ship always stayed far enough away from the face of the glacier to avoid damage from ice suddenly calving. We never got closer than about 100 yards. This picture is the same as the previous picture, but from farther away. The scale up close really is deceiving. Here is some debris along the edge of a glacier. The rock has been carved away by a once larger sheet of ice. This is one of the few places in the world where some glaciers are actually advancing. That's about 300 feet high. We stuck around for a while and got to see a house-sized piece of ice calve here. Here's a close up of the previous slide. Some ice has calved in between the two pictures. This glacier has an interesting line of rocky debris embedded in the ice. A closeup of the previous slide. When Harriman came up in 1899, he brought along many famous biologists, ornithologists and naturalists of the day. The Harriman expedition was documented in 14 volumes, many of them written by the one of the voyagers, author John Burroughs. The Smithsonian republished the entire series in 1910. Deeply eroded cliffs funnel water to the fiord. Here is a kitiwake rookery near the mouth of College Fiord. We're on our way back to the port of Whitter. The big building in the middle of the photo is the Buckner Building - abandoned by the Army seven years after it was built in 1953. <span class='myGreyFont'>[End of series. <a href='../index.html'>Return</a> to the Photos page.]</span>