Sailing the Icy Strait

Icy Straits, Alaska

My recent trip to Alaska was a combined land and sea adventure. As I have probably mentioned before, one of my bucket list items is to visit and photograph as many US National Parks as I can. On this trip, I was going to get to visit two of them: Denali National Park and Glacier Bay National Park. After spending time on mainland Alaska and in Denali, we boarded a cruise ship to see the inside passage including Glacier Bay National Park. Sailing down from Hubbard Glacier the day before, we entered into the Icy Strait early the next morning. The Icy Strait is in the Alexander Archipelago and can be entered from the Alaskan mainland from the north. Continuing into the strait reaches the entrance to Glacier Bay en-route to Juneau to the south. To say that the scenery was breathtaking is an understatement.

This is one of the numerous images I shot from the deck of our ship. The wind was whipping around and I was dressed in layers with gloves on. The interesting thing about it was even though it was cold, I hardly seemed to notice. The light was good, the clouds added great interest to the snow-capped mountains. These mountains are actually part of the national park, namely Glacier Bay Park and Wilderness.