Ketchikan, Alaska

College Fjord - July 24, 2008

We were awoken (woken up? awakened?) at approximately 6 a.m. the first full day of the cruise, the day of the storm! However, the storm was yet to arrive although portents of it were certainly in evidence. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. Michelle, the ship's naturalist, came over the loud speaker very early in the day and basically (and much more tactfully) said we were at College Fjord, this is why we came on the cruise, so get up and go see it! So I and a bunch of other hardy souls did.

The pictures below are the best of the lot I took. It looks overcast because it was. It was overcast and rainy/misty and cold, with little actual daylight although the sun had been up for a few hours by this point. I did the best I could with Adobe Photoshop but Photoshop and I have a lot to learn about one another....

College Fjord is an inlet with several glaciers which come down from the mountains into the sea. Some of the glaciers are many miles long. The glaciers were all named after colleges about 100 years ago and the names stuck. They are awe-inspiring - after all, they have been here an awful long time. All but the Harvard Glacier are receding - the Vasser Glacier no longer reaches the sea.