Glacier Bay Podcasts: Welcome and Tips (19:53)

Glacier Bay Podcasts: Welcome and Tips(19:53)

Interview Hosts: Elizabeth Harriman & Paul Lasley

Interview Guests: Cherry Payne, Park Superintendent Randy Thomas, Ranger & Naturalist

ELIZABETH: Whales, puffins, sea otters, and moving rivers of ice, there's no place on Earth quite like Glacier Bay National Park, in Alaska. I'm Elizabeth Harriman.

PAUL: And I'm Paul Lesley. Join us as we talk to some fascinating people who are going to give us, well, a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most special wilderness areas in the world. We will talk to Rangers and naturalists who work and study in the park.

ELIZABETH: And they're going to share with us some remarkable insights into the glaciers and spectacular wildlife both in the water and on the land, that may make your Holland America cruise into Glacier Bay an experience of a lifetime. So let's begin this journey together. You know, Paul, do you remember the very first time you ever sailed into Glacier Bay?

PAUL: Well I actually do, because it was on a Holland America cruise, and it was sort of one of those cold Alaska days but they gave us hot pea soup and there's wool blankets to wrap up in, so it was a little cold but it was so fascinating. I stayed out on deck the whole time.There was just so much to see and do and I'll always remember that first cruise.

ELIZABETH: It really is amazing. First of all, you spend like the whole day in Glacier Bay and it is kind of like sailing into a refrigerator, so be sure you wear your earmuffs, gloves, scarves and stuff so you don't get so cold because you're going to want to stay out on deck as much as possible. But going into Glacier Bay, I remember we saw the harbor seals sort of resting on little icebergs and as you get closer you get closer and closer to the end of Glacier Bay where Margerie Glacier is, oh my gosh it's this beautiful,towering, towering castles of this kind of blue ice, and yes, the sound when it calves, the natives call it White Thunder and it is like rumbling that it is coming from the center of the Earth and then it burst forth and you see like a whole cliff full of ice just fall into the water and typically you're close enough that when the glacier calves, the water you know moves and you can feel the ship rock from the movement of the glacier. So you are really going to enjoy your visit to Glacier Bay National Park. And to help you enjoy your visit we've talked to some very special people. Now first we're going to talk to Cherry Payne to help you get the most out of your visit to Glacier Bay.

PAUL: And Cherry Payne is the superintendent, she runs the whole place you know, imagine getting to run a national park. Well she has a long and very distinguished career in the National Park Service and Cherry this must be the experience of a lifetime being here in Glacier Bay.

CHERRY: You know I've been here for 3 years and I find myself kicking myself, why did it take me so long to get here. I've been in the Park Service for a lot of years and this is a magnificent and amazing place and everyday is something new and something amazing to see for all of us.

PAUL: I think what a lot of people don't understandor just because they don't know about it, is that this is a world heritage site or part of a world heritage site so you have Glacier Bay and Wrangell St. Elias National Park and of course, a couple parks in Canada.

CHERRY: And that's correct. It is 23 million acres and collectively those four areas comprise one of the largest protected areas in the world.

PAUL: What makes Glacier Bay so special?

CHERRY: Glacier Bay is the site or the scene of the largest documented glacial retreat ever recorded in the history of the world. 250 years ago we sitting right here would have been under 200 feet of ice, and in a period of just over a hundred years the ice retreated 50 to 60 miles back up the bay. So what this place offers is a tremendous huge scientific laboratory to study not only tidewater glaciers but what happens to the land after the glaciers retreat.

PAUL: So the land here is changing a lot, when you say that you can watch the land after the glaciers retreat and it's only been a couple hundred years.

ELIZABETH: So the land actually bounces back?

CHERRY: It is. We are on rising land, which is a geologic term called isostatic rebound, and it is coming up about an inch or so a year and it's all a result of the tremendous weight of the glaciers being relieved off of the surface of the Earth. The other phenomenon that is interesting is that because of that weight change, it can prompt earthquakes in the area, so we have quite a few earthquakes. Not huge ones, but there have been some very large ones in Glacier Bay.

PAUL: Probably a good reason to be on a cruise.

CHERRY: Well that's right, you just slouch around on the boat.

PAUL: I've been told that you don't even notice an earthquake on a ship. But Glacier Bay from the sea is magical because you get to experience this amazing amount of wildlife that's here and also the scenic wonders. I think for most people cruising here is an ideal way to see it.

CHERRY: It's a great way. The park is the size of the state of Connecticut. It’s 3.3 million acres. It's a huge intact ecosystem. The landscape is almost beyond people's ability to understand it. Mount Fairweather, at 15,300 feet is the highest point in the park, and the lowest point in the park is 1400 feet below sea level. So you have these underwater canyons that go down from the bottom of those to the top of Mount Fairweather is almost seventeen thousand feet in a very short distance.

PAUL: Tell it's a little bit about the experience of cruising in Glacier Bay and what makes it special from your perspective.

CHERRY: That day is a day where the guests on the ship do not go into Port. The entire experience is from the ship. When the ship enters the park we have a vessel, a 26-foot pilot vessel that will pull up alongside the ship while it is still moving and our staff climbs on board, the parks ranger board the ship and offers educational and educational services throughout the day on board. So not only are you in this spectacular place but there are experts on board the ship who can tell you about what you're seeing and essentially lead you on this trip back in time that the guest take as they travel up the glaciers. And of course it culminates with stopping at the glacier, usually Margerie Glacier, and hopefully there’ll be some calving, which is spectacular in terms of visually and noise wise as well, great pops and groans and cracks as the glacier calves.

PAUL: And it really is. There is something almost indefinable about standing on the deck of the ship and listening to the ice. You even hear that little clinking of the ice, what do they call them, bergy bits, I think.

CHERRY: The little pieces of ice that come off and if you're lucky, and I've never seen it, people can see what's called a shooter, which is when an iceberg actually releases from below the water and flies up out of the water unexpectedly sort of like a submarine submerging rapidly. One of the other things I really enjoy at the face of the glacier is listening to the wild life. As a glaciers calves the kittiwakes, which is a sea bird, will fly up and around and they have a pretty distinctive call and the glacier calving will actually disturb a food source for them, it disturbs fish and so forth and they take advantage of that.

ELIZABETH: So when the glaciers calve that actually provides food for the wildlife in Glacier Bay.That's fascinating. I never realized that. Now, also there are seals up near the glaciers. I understand they give birth up there because it's harder for the killer whales and other predators to get among the ice. Is that right? CHERRY: Well, they do. The seals will take refuge particularly the mothers with pups, on ice floes, because the killer whales don't come up after them. And also the water is quite cold, as you can imagine, it's like a big glass of ice water, salty water. And so seals expend a lot of energy when they go into the water, particular the pups, who don't have a large of a body mass as the adults and they can lose heat and energy.

PAUL: It must be a remarkable thing to get up everyday and be here.

CHERRY: You know, it's so wonderful. Just the other day I was in my personal boat out outside of the park and we were in an area where whales feed, that the cruise ships go through, and every time I see one of those massive, huge animals, they are amazing, and you learn something new and different about them just by observing them. And as you see behaviors you want to learn about them.

ELIZABETH: And the history of Glacier Bay is so fascinating. From what I've been learning, and correct me if I'm wrong, back in the day when George Vancouver and the early explorers passed by here this was basically just a wall of ice. They didn't even, there was no bay it was just ice. But before that, I understand, a couple hundred years before that, the Tlingit were here in the valley. A lovely valley which hadn't yet been carved out by glaciers. I mean the change that's been here over the centuries, and it sounds like it's very rapid from a geological point of view. It's amazing. So tell me a little bit about the Tlingit because they actually have names for all of this and they saw this, before the ice and after the ice.

CHERRY: They did. They inhabited this broad grassy valley as you described, with the glacier sitting at the head of that valley. And it was where they had fish camps and homes, and it was rich with food sources and bounties and the Tlingit have a very complex and wonderful culture because of that. Because they had leisure lime to focus on art and regalia and so forth. And the glacier advanced very suddenly, and there's geologic support of that. But in their oral tradition, they talk about this glacier advancing very rapidly and forcing them out of Glacier Bay over and over across the icy straight to a community called Huna. Which in Tlingit it means "People Protected from the North Wind". So they have a strong tradition and association with what is now the park and that tradition continues to live today. In their engagement with the park, twice a year we work in partnership with the tribe and go up bay to Margerie Glacier where there's a very special ceremony held with elders and youth and it is a way that they can continue their culture and engagement with their landscape which is so important to them and their tradition.

PAUL: You mentioned this is the largest Marine protected area in United States? CHERRY: We are the largest Marine Park in the National Park system and it is one of the largest protected areas in the U.S.

ELIZABETH: And of course you can see Glacier Bay in lots of ways. There are lots of ways to see it on land. But I think the best way to see Glacier Bay is by cruise ship. In fact Glacier Bay is one of those places, and there are several on Earth, that are best seen on a cruise ship.

CHERRY: Absolutely, being on board a vessel opens up so many doors, otherwise it's really inaccessible. I think that folks on board the cruise ship, if they spend time out on deck listening to the commentary offered by the rangers, will learn a lot and they'll see wildlife perhaps they've never seen, and hear sounds that they've never heard and see some spectacular country. And if they're lucky and it's not raining they may see a piece of the mountains or two.

ELIZABETH: It does rain a lot here, but then there are days when the air just sparkles and it's just beautiful.

PAUL: And I remember when in the naturalist that we talked to saying, well whenever it's raining we call that glacier making weather.

ELIZABETH: It's like California sunshine.

CHERRY: We do live here at Bartlett Cove in a rainforest and therefore it rains a lot.But the forest themselves are spectacular as well. I was hiking on a trail just the other day and I told someone that I felt like I was in a botanical garden. It was so lush and rich and streams running through. It's incredible. But the passengers on the ship don't have the opportunity to see that here, but they may in other ports of call in Southeast Alaska and I encourage them to explore those.

PAUL: Cherry Payne, thank you so much for joining us.

CHERRY: Thank you, it's been a pleasure and I hope that everyone who listens to this has a wonderful time in the park and takes home really special memories.

ELIZABETH:That was Cherry Payne, Parks superintendent of Glacier Bay National Park. To tell us a little bit more about the park we're going to be joined by Randy Thomas. He's a park ranger naturalist at Glacier Bay National Park and he's going to tell us a little bit about the things you need to know to get the most out of your visit to Glacier Bay. Randy is an expert at stuff he knows more about stuff and Glacier Bay than anyone else we know. Randy, you're a ranger naturalist at Glacier Bay National Park and of course you’ve been out on the ships.What are the things that you see as the most important for people to bring to the experience so that they can get the most of their visit?

RANDY: This park is unlike many wilderness parks you been to.This park is little bit different. It is at the edge of the Earth. It is a foreign landscape, and so our sense of scale and size is about useless here, and there are things that you need to bring with you to this park and there are some things you need to leave behind. The things you can leave behind is that modern sense of immediacy, “I want this now and I know where I can get it”. That attitude that we've grown up with in this modern world just doesn't work in his place. This Wilderness is an ancient time clock. It will deliver sights and sounds at its whim. And so your job is to be open to anything and everything and this place has the ability to show you things that somebody, or that no one, has ever seen before. Have great expectations. This place is super in showing you things you have never seen before. But at the same time, those newsreels of crashing glaciers and jumping whales, we have that here, but we may not have that here when you want it to be here. So you're on its schedule, it's not on your schedule. There is one thing you can bring, and you should bring, you know, is a jacket, camera, binoculars, but there's one thing that I encourage people to bring is that sense of discovery, that sense of imagination. That thing that got you in trouble as a young person, that works great in this place. The ranger will be narrating the story, the other ranger might have a PowerPoint program, but if your imagination is dull, you won't be able to fill in the gaps. That sense of imagination will color the palate so to speak, it will bring the sights and sounds to your mind's eye. And this job that you have, is to help your ranger who is in turn trying to help you, get the most of your stay in Glacier Bay. No one person can take it all in, even we rangers have trouble. It is a steep learning curve here. So we have partners at work with us as well. You may come to Holland America ship and see representative from the Alaska Geographic Association. They are just one year younger than the state of Alaska itself. Formed after the year the state was given statehood they are a not-for-profit organization that takes books and DVDs and educational material and they sell them in the parks in the public lands and then they take 20% of those proceeds and put them right back into that Park. In our case in Glacier Bay they provide the rangers with their backpacks, their binoculars, they bring educators to the park to train us in learning the natural history of the place, and they turn around and take the rest of the proceeds and produce these DVDs and books that will help you understand Glacier Bay. Even a month in a year after you're gone, you can grab that book or DVD and if you didn't catch the answer from the ranger when you ask that question, that book or DVD probably has that same answer waiting for you. So it's a great partnership. PAUL: Randy Thomas, thank you, and thank you for the information on the Alaska Geographic. It is a great non-profit organization and it is a way to get more information than you will even on your one day adventure here and Glacier Bay.

RANDY: And one other thing about Alaska Geographic, when you decide to purchase a book or DVD on let's say, marine mammals or glaciers, 20% of the proceeds goes right back into the park so you have a direct connection to the stewardship of the public lands of Alaska with any purchase you make to the Alaska Geographic Association.

PAUL: And Randy, the other thing about the Alaska Geographic is that you can be absolutely certain, that as with everything you learn from a ranger or naturalist on a ship, it is absolutely true. It's the best science can do and it's absolutely accurate. So you're going home with the best experience possible. Well, you know about the jumping whale, you might just see a jumping whale.

ELIZABETH: Randy Thomas is a park ranger naturalistic at Glacier Bay National Park. Thank you for joining usin Glacier Bay National Park. This recording is a copyright production of Holland America Line's and is made possible to the cooperation of the Rangers and scientists who work and study in Glacier Bay National Park.