HUBBARD'S GLACIER  -  BLUE ICE IN THE MIST

When Team Maxing Out sailed around the world on Exit Only, we made a trade wind circumnavigation.

The advantage of a trade wind circumnavigation is that we were almost always warm.  We dropped our anchor in tropical paradise where palm trees swayed in the breeze and turquoise water surrounded us on all sides.

The disadvantage of trade wind sailing is that we missed out on cold destinations in all their glory. 



Although we don't like cold wet weather when we are sailing, if we don't have to sail our own boat to those destinations, cold adventures can be awesome.

We thought about sailing Exit Only to Alaska through the inside passage, but we quickly dismissed such notions from our mind. We had gone through several winters on board Exit Only in the relatively mild winters of New Zealand, and even they were too cold for our thin blood. It might have something to do with the fact that we lived in Saudi Arabia for eleven years, and we were acclimated to temperatures over one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Our personal thermostats definitely have a warm bias. We would rather be hot than cold.



If we were ever going to visit a glacier in Alaska or travel the inside passage, it would not be in our own sailboat.

Fortunately, traveling the inside passage is easy if you are willing to spend the money. Simply rent a cabin on a ship, and begin your photo safari in Alaska.

Although I have no interest in shipboard casinos and fancy staterooms on cruise ships, I am more than willing for them to transport me to the cold places on planet earth where I would never sail on my own yacht. A ship is convenient and makes an excellent platform from which to photograph Alaskan glaciers.
 

Sailing to Alaska on Exit Only would require a minimum of four months. The trip from Florida to Panama takes two weeks. Making the passage through the Panama Canal is another week if you are lucky. Then you sail for sixty days to arrive in Hawaii. You follow that up with a two week sail to arrive in Vancouver. Then you are ready for the inside passage.

All along the way you will be dodging weather bullets, dealing with massive tides and rip currents, and cooling your heels waiting for weather windows that will let you to proceed on your voyage. If nothing breaks, and if everything works as planned, four months later you are looking at Hubbard Glacier in Yakutat Bay from the deck of your own yacht.

The other option is to fly to Seattle and get on a cruise ship. In one week, you get to see the same glacier with a lot less expense and trouble.

Although the wind is free, sailing is expensive. There is diesel fuel for the engines, and when sails and gear wear out, expenses rapidly mount. If you break any gear or have problems, you can easily spend two or three times the amount of money that you spend sailing on a cruise ship.



If the truth be told, I tolerate cruise ships. They are the means to an end. I want a photographic safari in a discrete period of time. I don't want to spend four months to get my pictures of the Hubbard Glacier. Time is now my most valuable and scarce resource. There aren't any time banks where I can go to get more time. I am jealous of the way that I spend my time, because when I waste my time, I waste my life. I want to get the biggest bang I can get from my time buck. So when I want to photograph a glacier, I do it in a way that does not bankrupt my time account.

Anyone can take pictures of a glacier and get reasonable photographs. It isn't rocket science if it is on an overcast day with soft light. If the glacier is in bright sunlight with cloudless skies, the same photos will be more difficult to take because of the high dynamic range in the pictures.

When I sailed into Yakutat Bay in Alaska, I was disappointed that the sun wasn't shining, but I was elated that there was extremely soft light. The job of photographing Hubbard Glacier was going to be much easier because the whites would not be blown out in the photographs. Digital photography has major challenges in high dynamic range situations. Either the whites will be blown out or the darks will be so dark that they lack definition.

A cloudy day works wonders for amateur photographers. Exposure is less of a problem, and composition is king. You have the opportunity to shoot scenes ten different ways, and you never know what you have until you upload the photos and see the magic.

The face on Hubbard's Glacier is seven miles long and stands three-hundred and fifty feet high. It's the height of a thirty-five story building that periodically falls into the sea with a thunderous crack and enormous splash creating a small tsunami. It's not much of a wave when you are a couple of miles away on a ship, but if you were up close and personal in a small yacht, you could easily find yourself in serious difficulty.

Harbor seals with their young pups bask in the intermittent sunshine at the base of the glacier. Killer whales don't bother the seals at the Hubbard glacier, and this is an ideal place for seals to give birth to their young without much risk of being devoured by predators.


 

Seals lie comfortably on bergy bits and growlers far enough from the glacier's face that they don't worry about flying ice.  If a tidal wave knocks them off their patch of ice, they simply go for a swim, and then climb up on another piece of icy not-so-real-estate.

Hubbard Glacier is one of the few glaciers on planet earth that is still advancing forward.  That is probably because it lies to windward of a massive mountain which creates a microclimate that dumps an endless supply of snow and ice on it's western slopes causing the glacier to relentlessly grow seaward.

On a clear day, you can see Mount Walsh rising up 11,000 feet skyward behind the Hubbard Glacier.  Although it would be awesome to have the majesty of Mount Walsh in your glacier pictures, you loose the mystical appearance created by the clouds enshrouding the glacier when the sun has not burned off the fog.

If you decided to shoot the Lord of the Rings in cold climes, this would be the place to make it happen.