Glacier Bay

Bartlett Cove is the easiest place in the region to meet this water, a sheltered, shallow cove where forest runs right down to the tideline. It is a fair introduction to the whole idea of a young sea: the forest at your back is itself fairly new, grown up on ground the ice only recently uncovered, and the birds on the water in front of you cross the line between the two worlds constantly. Rafts of sea ducks ride the calm surface. Small diving seabirds surface, vanish, and reappear yards away. Along the shore, gulls work the tideline for whatever the water has left behind. One resident here does the forest-to-sea commute better than anything else: the marbled murrelet. Give the cove some time rather than a glance. The animals that use it are moving constantly between shore and water, water and forest, and the connections only show themselves to a patient watcher.

Lester Island is a low, forested island lying just off the cove, the southernmost in a small scatter of islands known as the Beardslees. Like the mainland shore, it shows the same young pairing of new forest and new sea meeting at a single line, but on an island the line runs all the way around, and there is no direction you can walk to get away from it. Sheltered channels separate Lester from its neighbors, calm enough water that rafts of ducks and resting gulls collect there on quiet days. Because the islands sit low and the passages between them are narrow, this is small-boat country rather than a place you can drive to, and the slower pace of a paddle suits the kind of watching it rewards. Come by kayak on a still morning and the island barely announces itself until you are close: a dark line of trees, a fringe of bare rock at the waterline, and, usually, more birds working the edge than the eye first catches from a distance.

The same cove looks like a different place at low water. As the tide falls, it uncovers a wide shelf of mud and rock that the forest and the deep water both hide the rest of the time, and for an hour or two it becomes the richest feeding ground on this shore. Gulls walk the exposed flat, picking through what the retreating water leaves stranded. Long-legged shorebirds probe the softer mud at the edges for whatever lives just beneath the surface. None of it lasts: the tide always returns, burying the flat again until the next low water calls the birds back. Watching this stretch of shoreline over a single tide cycle is a fast education in how much a coastline changes without a single storm or season passing – twice a day, for free, the sea simply steps back and shows you what it has been hiding.

The rocky fringe around Lester Island is bared twice a day by the tide, and at low water it becomes feeding ground for whatever can reach it. Shorebirds work the edge methodically, and one resident does it better than the rest: the black oystercatcher. High tide erases the whole scene, covering the rock and sending the birds elsewhere to rest; low tide, especially a big one, exposes the widest shelf and the most food. The rhythm is entirely reliable even where nothing else about the weather is, which makes this one of the more predictable wildlife-watching windows in the area, provided you know the tide and can reach the island to use it.

Icy Strait is the broad, deep channel that carries this region’s cold water out toward the open gulf, and crossing it is the surest way to see the marine life that keeps to deeper water rather than a sheltered cove. Depth changes everything here. Where the coves nearby are shallow and still, the strait is a moving body of open sea, and its currents stir food up toward the surface along visible seams and slicks. Seabirds gather wherever the water is working: puffins and murres, gulls and kittiwakes that follow the feeding, terns working the surface in fast, diving passes. None of it is evenly spread. The birds are a visible map of where the current is doing something, and a crossing that looks like empty water from the middle can turn, at a current seam, into a working feeding line thick with birds in a few hundred meters. Give the water your attention on a crossing rather than the shore receding behind you; the sea’s business here happens on the move.

Icy Strait has always been a road as much as a sea, and its human history is mostly a history of traffic and its hazards. Small ferries still thread these passages today, linking communities that have no highway connecting them to the outside world, much as earlier vessels did in the age of steam. The strait does not make that traffic easy. In the 1880s, an early steamship called the Ancon ran onto a rock here hard enough to tear herself open; she survived that grounding and limped away, only to be wrecked for good years later on a different stretch of the Alaska coast. None of it shows on the water’s surface today. But the strait a ferry crosses is the same one that has demanded steady, careful seamanship from everyone who has used it as a road, for about as long as anyone has kept a written record of the crossing.