Pacific NW

Expeditions

In the spirit of my personal hero Sir Ernest Shackleton, we set out to lodge ourselves in the ice sheet for the night at the head of Tracy Arm. In doing so, it would give us two more days to watch the Sawyer glacier. I cooked up some grits for breakfast, and the sun came out and gave us another fantastic run up Tracy Arm. We paused for a half hour or so to take photos of Silent Partner next to one of the bigger icebergs. Sawyer glacier wasn’t nearly as active today, though anything would be anticlimactic after our last experience there! A bit of wind picked up and hampered safe navigation in the ice flow. As we retreated to the ice sheet, large portions of the Sawyer’s face let go. As we exited the glacial canyon, we picked up chunks of ice onto the boat from amongst the pack of growlers and brash ice. The most prized chunks were those that were from the blue ice, which contained no air bubbles at all and were almost invisible in the water. Lee snagged a few small ones, and then we got a bit carried away. Soon we were hoisting up chunks that were on the verge of being too heavy to heave into the cockpit. Finally, we rigged up a 5:1 block and tackle from the end of the boom and began hoisting enormous blocks of ice into the cockpit, until it was completely full to the brim! If anything, it was a great man-overboard exercise in how to hoist a “person” out of the water, and we all had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. Perhaps all this ice is making us all a little insane. Later on, after tiring of having all the inconvenience of a boatload of huge ice blocks, we threw them back overboard. I had to take my axe to them and chop them into smaller manageable pieces so we could lift them out of the cockpit! Once again we broke a path through the ice sheet until we could go no further. Next, we chopped two holes in the ice off our bow, and lashed Lee’s iceberg poles to the bow, passing them through the holes in the ice. We had a great view of the glacier, and it was a thrill to be in the middle of the immense ice sheet! I started a blazing fire in the woodstove, and Christoph and I played a game of cribbage while Lee cooked up some beans and potatoes. After dinner we stepped out onto the deck and saw one of the most amazing and weird things I’ve ever seen. Darkness had set in, and it had begun to snow, so it was almost pitch black. But from underneath the ice, patches of bioluminescence were lighting up, making the whole ice sheet glow from within, with an eerie blinking pattern! Each patch was 2-3 feet in diameter, giving off a brilliant light– it was the brightest bioluminescence I’ve ever seen. The patches would remain lit for 3-5 seconds, and spread out in all directions from the boat as far as we could see through the darkness and snow. How strange! Later, with our remaining eggs and flour, we baked another huge chocolate chip cookie in the dutch oven. Suddenly, there was a sickening crunch as the boat lurched slightly in the ice pack, followed by a long grating of the ice rasping against the hull for about 10 seconds, and then…silence. I rushed out onto the deck and my worst fears were confirmed: the entire sheet of our port-hand side had broken free and was drifting away from the boat! A slight wind had picked up, putting a new strain on our ice pole anchors, which were now the only thing holding us to the main pack. The enormous sheet of ice on our port hand quickly drifted off and broke up in the night, leaving us with open water to possibly contend with. It would be a long night. I established a night watch rotation, and we took turns checking the anchors every 15 minutes, all night long through to the morning. I actually had quite a pleasant experience on my watch. We kept the wood fire going all night, and it snowed quite heavily for awhile. I turned on the anchor light and watched the snow swirl down and around the boat, the silence complete, save for the occasional groaning and popping as the ice sheet shifted. Watching the snow around the anchor light reminded me of how I used to watch the snow falling quietly in the street lights of Minneapolis at night. “Silent Partner’s” guardian angels proved true to us, and we held fast to the remainder of the sheet through the night. We were a tiny speck of warmth and light, surrounded by an immensity of ice and mile-high peaks, floating on water 1,200 feet deep, hundreds of miles in all directions from the middle of nowhere. For what it felt like, we may as well have been three astronauts, silently orbiting the dark side of the moon.