HUBBARD GLACIER
As part of the cruise, Celebrity took us to view the Hubbard Glacier. There is no town here; there is really nothing here save the Glacier and pristine wilderness. Hubbard is in a bay all to itself. The glacier is just immense. It is 6 miles across and hundreds of feet tall at the face, sometimes reaching over 1000 feet in height. Celebrity actually contracts to have a special pilot brought in to pilot the cruise ship in the bay. This special pilot is very familiar with the glacier and the water surrounding it. We were very fortunate on our viewing this day. The pilot was able to bring our enormous cruise ship within 0.6 miles of the face of the glacier - a record in Celebrity's book. The glacier is just unbelievably huge. And it's really difficult to get a good handle on it's size, especially when you are on a ship that is nearly 900 feet long and 14 stories tall.
As fortune would have it a small fishing boat with, I'm guessing here, 6 people aboard floated quite close to Hubbard. This really helps bring home how large this river of ice is.
The weather again was fantastic. It was 50 degrees and partly cloudy, little wind. Again, as fortune would have it, we got to see a couple very large calving's. Calving is when a chunk of the glacier breaks off and falls into the water. Of course when a piece of ice, hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet deep, falls into the water, you get a really big splash. And that is what we got. And was it ever spectacular. The splashes were nearly as high as the glacier itself.
I shot everything on Velvia using the 100-400 zoom, And, I used my tripod. The only time on the trip I shot with a tripod. It was such a comforting feeling being able to mount the camera on top of the Bogen. I was once again, one with my camera. It was really quite Zen like.
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Unless otherwise indicated, all text and photos copyright1995-2000 John Engle