South Sawyer Glacier (Tracy Arm)

Yesterday, a group of us Bread Loafers boarded a small icebreaking vessel to travel down the Lynn Canal from Juneau and then back north up Tracy Arm toward Canada to see South Sawyer Glacier. South Sawyer is the most actively calving glacier in Alaska and for that reason it has become a tourist destination. People dedicate a whole day to a journey whose sole purpose is to witness and capture on film the breaking up of a glacier into icebergs which will float away to melt in the relative warmth of the ocean. For those of us who made the pilgrimage aboard the Wild Alaskan yesterday, the irony of our own attitude chilled us more than the crisp sea air cooled by the over-sized ice cubes floating next to us. We had come to see a glacier calve, but each time an ice shelf crashed into the water, we remembered South Sawyer's staggering statistic: While the glacier is currently 30 miles long, we are sitting 6 miles from the Canadian border, and the glacier is melting 60 feet per day. At the current rate of recession, Alaskan visitors to South Sawyer glacier will need to carry a passport in January 2008!

An extensive series of photographs accompanies this entry. The viewer may find that the photo blog for my Tracy Arm trip lacks a cohesive caption sequence typical of my other photo series. My loss for words reflects a combination of awe and the lack of a narrative framework to the spiritually nonlinear pilgrimage.

Click here and scroll up to join me.