Days 6 & 7: Glacier Bay & College Fjord

I don't know about you but this Alaska stuff is starting to bore me. We'll make this quick. After Skagway there were 2 days at sea. Glacier Bay and College Fjord are National Parks where about 90% of the visitors are on boats. They regulate how many boats can be in the area and in order to be there we had to have a park ranger on board and all other ship activities and services were closed for the day. This was by far the most breath-taking part of the whole trip. It was so amazing. It was pretty cold and windy on the top decks of the boat and my parents wimped out but I couldn't stop staring at the mountains and glaciers. There was some definite awe happening.

Pretty.

There are glaciers everywhere!
This was my first fjord.

This one is a hanging glacier because it's up in a mountain.

You can't really tell but there are TONS of seals on all of that ice.
From the boat you couldn't really tell how far we were away from things.
We had to use binoculars to see these seals but it looked like the ice was only a few feet from the ship. It was weird.

The black lines are from glaciers that have collided. The dirt builds up on the sides of the glacier and makes a stripe of dirty ice when the two sheets meet.

On the balcony on the way out of the fjord.

This was the day I realized that we were in a really cool place in the world. Seeing how God created and continues to create the earth that we live in is so amazing. It's just incredible to see how mountains and valleys and rivers are just carved out. I tend to think I'm the kind of person that would just get over stuff like water and mountains but I'm really glad that I have yet to become hardened to the beauty of creation. I mean seriously, if this were just something that the earth happened to be doing as some sort of happenstance, would the glaciers really be that blue? I don't think so.