A ship small in size, grand in adventure

September 25, 2005|George Oxford Miller, Globe Correspondent

JUNEAU, Alaska -- ''Don't talk or make sudden movements or you'll scare the seals," the skipper of our inflatable skiff says as we approach the jam of small icebergs. We carefully thread our way through the maze of fractured ice from the glacier in the distance. Some bergs resemble giant mushrooms, while others glow blue as though they have captured the heart of the sky. Many serve as haul-outs for mother harbor seals and their pups.

The resting seals raise their heads and watch us warily with soulful stares. We slip past only a few yards from their temporary homes on the drifting floes.

''The seals swim this far up Tracy Arm with their pups to get away from the killer whales," Kurt Hardcastle, the ship naturalist and skiff captain, tells us. ''The whales wait at the mouth of the fiord for the mothers and pups to return to sea."

Our up-close view of Alaska's Inside Passage, the long and skinny southeastern strip of the state, on the small ship Safari Quest isn't a sugar-coated view of nature. This is teenage land, younger and more rambunctious than the geriatric landscape of the Lower 48. We cruise through narrow fiords with 1,000-foot sheer walls cut by the icy cleaver of glaciers. Jagged snow-capped peaks thrust up by the relentless force of the tectonic plates surround us. A 6.8 earthquake shakes Petersburg the day before we visit the fishing village. Off the ship, we hike through ancient forests, kayak in mirror-surfaced coves, and explore tidal streams in the yacht's small skiff.

Our 12-cabin expedition yacht leaves the large cruise ships behind when we enter Tracy Arm, a narrow, 24-mile-long fiord with two glaciers at the end. We cruise under mist-covered peaks with ribbon waterfalls that, like funnels, pour water from the clouds to the emerald surface of the fiord. The captain pulls the ship into the spray of one cascade and gives passengers a brisk shower. When we reach South Sawyer Glacier, which calves into the fiord, we load into the skiff.

Hardcastle maneuvers through the fractured bergs to within several hundred yards of the face of the glacier. The scale of the 500-foot-tall, half-mile-wide wall of ice deceives us until we see seals that look like dots of pepper on the floes at the foot of the glacier. We sit in silence and listen to the sounds the glacier makes as it inches forward. It's like Fourth of July fireworks. Sharp retorts and cannon blasts echo through the chilled air. Occasionally, fragments shatter and plummet into the water.

We listen and marvel at the awesome power of the spectacle. This is not a butterflies-in-a-meadow scene. Suddenly, a machine-gun series of retorts shatters the silence. A skyscraper-sized chunk of ice fractures and plunges into the sea.