As previously mentioned, we took a jet boat ride to Le Conte glacier but did not actually make it to the glacier. Still, I took a bazillion pictures as I was totally impressed by the little bits of ice (not big enough to be icebergs -- I was told the technical term is "Bergie Bits") that had calved away and were floating along in the water on our way to the glacier.
For instance: an initial bergie bit. It had floated quite some ways to be nearly alone like this:
My father got the "wildlife spot" of the day, when he said, "Isn't that a bald eagle over on that one?"
As we got closer to the glacier, the water started to be spotted with bergie bits:
A significant percentage of each bergie bit (more than half) is actually underwater:
And they're blue. I mean, really, really blue. This photograph is not altered. The damn things are blue. Seems that the ice is so densely packed that they absorb all the other colors of light that reach them, reflecting back only the blue. This will be a recurring theme in later photographs:
Here's another one of those Me-Having-Fun-With-Reflections photos -- it's my favorite of this set:
And finally, this is why we couldn't get to the glacier. All of a sudden, the scattered population of bergie bits started to look like this and the jet boat could go no further:
So, we turned back, glacier unseen. Of course, the next day, we went to Glacier Bay, so we would be remedying that.
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