Saturday, Aug. 13th - Morning - LeConte Glacier

Busy day today ! Woke up and made breakfast for ourselves using products provided by the B&B. Then walked down to the dock for our scheduled 8AM jet boat tour to LeConte Glacier, with Breakaway Adventures. This turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip.

Weather was cloudy and foggy. We were a small group (about 6 or 7 people) together with a captain and his 'hand'. The boat was fairly basic and the ride towards LeConte Bay was very bumpy, but we still enjoyed the sail and the misty scenery around us.

As we approached the opening of LeConte Bay, we started to see more and more ice floating on the water.

As we got deeper into the bay and towards the glacier itself, we became surrounded by huge amounts of ice in all sizes, shapes and colors (although the crew said this is the lowest amount of ice they saw this season!).

The dark, cloudy skies provided contrast and intensified the effect of the sparkling blue and white ice – a truly out-of-this-world vision (this term will repeat itself more and more in our trip...).

Finally we reached the glacier – our first Alaskan glacier and it was definitely impressive!

As can be expected from all the ice, LeConte glacier is very active and we witnessed multiple calving events.

The captain kept maneuvering the boat and pushing aside large amounts of ice so that we can get better views on the seals, the glacier itself, and the nearby waterfalls. Pushing the ice made us a bit nervous but he explained the boat thick aluminum hull is specially designed for such environment (as opposed to boats made of steel or fiberglass).

We were almost alone in the bay - except for one fishing boat, nor sure what they were doing there but they looked so tiny in front of the glacier, giving proportions to this wonder of nature.

While there were very few people around, there were hundreds of harbor seals lying on the ice. Most of them are pups but the pups were larger now and difficult to distinguish from adults.

There were also thousands of sea birds, on the ice and on the sheer canyon walls around us.

Overall we stayed near the glacier about 90 minutes. It was very cold and drizzly but we put on our extra layers and overall had incredible time. And this was only half the day!

Here are few more incredible views from LeConte. I highly recommend doing the detour to visit there.