Yesterday morning we boarded a tour boat for a day long cruise of this part of Alaska. This is the newest National Park and was established to protect the Harding Icefield which makes up about 90% of the park. The remainder is 3% rugged shoreline and 7% the Gulf of Alaska. National Park rangers ride boats instead of jeeps or horses. We saw a good set of wildlife on this tour including Humpback Whale, Orca Whale, Sea Otter, Doll's Porpoise, Steller Sea Lion, Harbor Seal, Common Murre, Bald Eagle, Horned Puffin, and Tufted Puffin. It really was a great end to our tours before having to head homeward. They served us a nice lite lunch on the boat and then stopped at a lodge for an all you can eat Salmon and Prime Rib buffet before we returned to the dock in Seward. There are many glaciers running downhill from this Icefield and we saw many of them. The largest in this area is where we stopped for about 20 minutes and was able to see and take pictures of some major calving. The captain shut off the engine on the boat and we were able to listen to the glacier noises as the large chunks of ice calved off. One huge chunk caused some major waves that rocked our boat sitting out about a 1/4 mile from it's face. That was the last picture in my album showing the calving.
I did get lots of pictures of the wildlife but was disappointed that while taking pictures of the humpback whale it chose to dive and show it's fluke just after I put my camera down. The captain said that the sea otter was a rare siting as they were almost totally destroyed by the Russian fur hunters before Alaska was sold to the US.
Sadly tomorrow morning we catch a bus back to Anchorage and our flight back to MO on Saturday.
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