Photo-essay : Tracing the Arm !

An Alaskan cruise was always something of a reverie, in that nebulous realm of future trips : of whale watching, of pristine and dramatic panoramas..... till the opportunity jumped us in summer of 2011. That the month of May was not the ideal one to visit and that we would be privy to only the tip of that proverbial iceberg (blue in this case) did not dampen the flurry.

This photo essay is my ode to one fragment of an sublime experience, the visit to the Tracy Arm fjord in the Tongass National Forest! If I strew across this piece, all the superlatives known to man, it might perhaps begin to epitomize what the eyes saw and the spirit felt. My camera will do most of the talking here!

Tracy Arm is a narrow 26 mile long fjord in the panhandle region of Alaska. The verdant temperate rain forest heralds the beginning of a kaleidoscope of canyons of strange bare rock, sheer cliffs, several waterfalls, limpid blue skies reflected in crystal waters, snowcapped mountains shrouded in mist, trees perched at impossible angles, blue icebergs floating in jade colored inland waters to the piece de resistance -the spectacular and very active reminders of the Ice Age - the twin Sawyer Glaciers!

This part of the trip started when the cruise ship made a stop somewhere close to Juneau and a group of us boarded a high-speed catamaran directly from the anchored ship. This vessel with its extraordinary maneuverability got us as close as was possible to the Glaciers. Abandoning the warm comfort of the cabin and the commentary of the on board naturalist, most of us rushed onto the topside observation deck to literally drink in the vistas oblivious of the wind chill factor ! The pictures trace the trip to the Glaciers and all the way back, via the rugged shores of Stephens Passage, to Juneau.