Endicott Arm to Dawes Glacier

As mentioned in the Norwegian Star blog, due to the mechanical problem delaying our arrival into Juneau till mid afternoon instead of early morning, our planned expedition was cancelled.

Instead, we would travel up Endicott Arm as far as we could –
which didn’t mean much at the time.

We woke around 6.30 with the sun’s rays beaming through the cabin and for a short while watched, from bed the panorama we were passing. The view was so enticing we needed to get out and photograph what we were seeing.

I don’t know any history of the area so I can’t write much at all (not such a bad thing I hear!)….so I googled it and these screen shots show where we were:

The yellow line on the right passing down the map is the Alaskan/Canadian border – Alaska on the left. Prior to our trip I thought we would have been sailing somewhere up to Anchorage to enter Alaskan waters, but not so due to the quite long “finger” of Alaskan territory passing south down the coast.

In 1866 the USA bought Alaska from Russia for less than 2 cents/acre, the total purchase price being $7.2 million. With all Alaska’s natural resources and beauty, makes you realize how astute the "Powers That Be" were at the time!

Around 8am Captain Lars got on the PA to say good morning and said, despite the fact he has been there more than 100 times, he has never seen the weather this good, ever – repeated a number of times!

The ship passed the first iceberg around 7.30 and in our excitement we took many photos of it. Then, as we progressed slowly further up the quite narrow passage, we passed more and more icebergs and I realised how silly that original shot of a single iceberg would look.



Dawes Glacier

Apparently the last two miles of the fjord are uncharted due to the rate of glacial melt being so rapid - it has not allowed chart makers to map depth and bottom contours for shipping in these two miles to the glacier.


To be honest, due to the beauty of what we saw we weren’t at all disappointed about the change in schedule – a truly breathtaking morning. I remained in my dressing gown watching from our balcony for the entire trip, not wanting to miss anything!