Spot the whale!

Wednesday morning, very early, we spent cruising through Tracy Arm Fjord. Tracy Arm was created by the movement of Sawyer Glacier, and let me just say, unless you’re right on them, glaciers are weird. Unless you’re right on top of them, they look oddly like discolored styrofoam. Like, Carls, remember the stuff we used to carve in the scene shop for various set elements? From a distance, glaciers look like Walter made them out of styrofoam and then one of us painted them really badly.

I did not expect that. (More on glaciers later. When you get close, you realize they still look kind of like dirty styrofoam, but they’re fucking huge.)

Fjords, on the other hand, are somewhere between a fairy tale and some part of Tolkien’s world Peter Jackson just hasn’t made a movie about yet.

I mean, jeez, Alaska, I already loved you, you didn’t have to try so hard.

The mooses and I are moving to this island. We will have a big Victorian house and every time a ship goes by we will go out and wave to it.

Get this far? Glacial ice looks blue or turquoise because it’s so dense it absorbs every other color we see – only blue scatters across its compressed crystalline structure. Did I know this last Wednesday? Hell no. I looked that shit up as soon as we had cell service close to Juneau. More details here.