Northwestern Fjord in the Kenai Fjords National Park

Many of Alaska's national parks are so remote that it is not possible to visit them except by boat or plane.  Kenai Fjords National Park is almost this remote.  Small bits of the park are accessible by land near Seward, and the park visitor center is in Seward itself.  But most of what the park is intended to preserve and protect -- the fjords and the glaciers, wildlife, geology and scenery they embrace -- cannot be appreciated without additional effort and expense.

When we were in Seward in 2016 with Kathy's sister and our brother-in-law, we took a wildlife cruise which introduced us to sections of the park in Resurrection Bay itself.  This year, we wanted to go deeper, so we booked the longest day-cruise available, a 9 hour boat ride to Northwestern Fjord, over 100 miles each way.  While a selfie with Northwestern Glacier is an obvious souvenir --

The education and memories we gained on the trip were even more important to us.

As our trip started at 8:30 am, we moved slowly past the town of Seward, sitting under Mount Marathon, and our RV campground stretching along the beach:

The boat's TV monitor displayed the digital GPS screen the pilot uses to navigate, making it easy for us to see where we were and our route so far:

Unfortunately, the morning was smoky and foggy, which made it difficult to see many things in Resurrection Bay itself.  We did get this faint view of Bear Glacier -- the largest glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park:

This shot, from the far side of the bay, turned out to be our best view of Bear Glacier, because, while our route back to port took us within 2 miles of the toe of the glacier, the fog was so bad in the afternoon that we couldn't even see the glacier at all from that much closer distance!

Once we cleared Resurrection Bay, the fog dissipated and the smoke from the Swan Lake Fire was no longer a factor.  It made for a glorious, sunny, cloudless day with calm waters for the rest of our trip.  This allowed us to get close and capture some interesting photographs of wildlife, including these seals:

While it's hard to make it out in the photo below, you can just see a rare red-faced cormorant standing sentry on this granite outcropping:

One of our biggest thrills of the day was this view of a humpback whale disrupting the gulls who had tracked and were feasting at a baitball -- a school of thousands of small baitfish.  We spotted the whale several miles from here while he was making a beeline toward this spot.  Our pilot followed him.  In this photo, you can see the whale first breach as he surges upward from below to swallow a bunch of fish -- and, incidentally, spoil the gulls' party:

After the whale breached, it spouted, took some breaths, then rolled and plunged downward again.  In this photo, you can see the last remnants of the spout as well as the hump back.  Notice that the gulls have fled the scene:

After much wildlife viewing, we entered Harris Bay and Northwestern Fjord and sailed past the first of seven named glaciers we viewed in the fjord.  This is Northeastern Glacier, with Northeastern Glacier Kayak Beach below it, a spot where we saw members of a sea kayaking tour preparing for an adventure in the fjord:

It wasn't long before we caught sight of the mammoth Northwestern Glacier.  This glacier, as well as many others in this region, are named after universities in the U.S. because the expedition that mapped and named them was had a large number of U.S. academics participating.

As we approached, the blues of the ice in the glacier became apparent, as did numerous small icebergs that were calving off this tidewater glacier, even as we watched.  For scale, note the small boat riding the water just in front of the glacier.  That boat had transported the sea kayakers to their beach and was making a circuit of the bay.  It approached much closer to the glaciers and was brave enough to cruise among the sea ice as well.

Here is a closer view of part of Northwestern Glacier, again with the little intrepid boat in it for scale:

We circled to the west and next encountered Ojive Glacier, which is notable as one whose iceflow falls off a vertical rock cliff, breaks up, and then reforms at the lower level and continues to flow down to the tidewater.  This jumbling and reforming of the glacier is what gives the glacier unusual striations and large serac-like features along its upper surface.  The brown color could have been caused by the jumbling as the glacier tumbled over the cliff, or it could have been a result of the 9.2 Richter scale earthquake that hit this area in 1964 and destroyed the Seward waterfront.  That quake also caused massive rockfalls to spill onto the surface of glaciers from surrounding mountains.

The last large glacier we visited was Southwestern Glacier, another tidewater ice flow.  All of the glaciers in the park flow out of the Harding Icefield, which is a mammoth sea of ice that is inaccessible except by air and occupies the center of the eastern Kenai Peninsula.

As we left Northwestern Fjord, our boat captain positioned the boat to give us a chance to catch this view of Southwestern and Ojive Glaciers on either side of the granite island in the foreground:

Our trip back to Resurrection Bay offered us a wide variety of geologic features and wildlife.  Here, our pilot steered the boat to within a few feet of the granite cliff wall, to allow us to examine this dramatic waterfall:

In another spot, we could get close enough to see these little seabirds sitting on their nests, which perch more precariously on a granite face than a rock climber camping on the side of El Capitan:

And, again, we found another colony of seals -- this one a rookery filled with half a dozen dominant, territorial males, their harems of females, and young seal pups all playing at being king of the mountain.  All were barking in their usual chaotic fashion.

What trip to this area is complete without puffins?  Here we were able to get close enough to view these little skalawags in a slot on the face of the cliff:

As we headed back to port, our captain said that he was proud to have shown us most of the typical species of wildlife in Kenai Fjords National Park -- other than sea otters, which we learned are the largest species of weasel.  Having no blubber, they are insulated from the frigid waters they occupy nearly full-time, by hairs that number one million to the square inch of skin!  They are playful animals and, because they have no blubber, have to eat 1/3 their body weight each day to use their metabolism to stay warm.  Our captain advised that, if we look around the harbor, we're bound to see some of these cute little eating machines.

And eat they do.  We found our sea otter after we debarked.  Sitting in a dockside restaurant for dinner after the cruise, we watched some men cleaning halibut for sport fisherman who were returning with their catches.  One of the men, having fileted one large fish, tossed the carcass to the sea otter.  The little furry guy, happily floated on his back, munching his free dinner -- but not for long before two gulls were attracted to the free meal and felt they were entitled to share.  The sea otter had other plans and engaged in acrobatics, as well as juggling the fish and dropping it underwater to retrieve it, so as to deny the gulls a line of attack.

We walked back to our RV after a very long, 13 hour day, and fell into bed dreaming of glaciers and sea life.