Helicopter tour of Meade Glacier

Today is Tuesday, so it must be Belgium!!

This joke has been rolling around between my mother and me for years. She travels a LOT, and has a blog of her own, and she swears sometimes people just get exhausted during travel and can't remember what day it is. THAT is how I feel about it today. Whatever the hell day it is.

Last night, we sang karaoke at the disco bar. I tried to sing White Rabbit and then Budapest by George Ezra. I was tired, so it wasn't perfect by any means. But it sure was fun. There was a young man named Brian who sang fun stuff like We Are Family and all of us got up to sing with him and to dance. He has an extra chromosome that gave him better singing ability, I think. We cheered him on. Karen sang a Barbara Streisand song, The Way We Were. It was amazing.

Robert and I opted for a big excursion in Skagway, today. We dock at 7:30 am but our tour group doesn't meet until 9:30, so we get up and shower and dress. Robert chooses to wear silk long johns under his clothes, knowing we'll be at the glacier today. I wear jeans, boots, and an under armour tee, knowing my Patagonia jacket and my hot flashes will keep me warm.

We wander to the breakfast buffet and eat. We finally get a window seat. I hear a couple women complaining about first world problems. They're whining about there not being enough food, or enough servers, and about the food being cold, all in that way only rich white women can do. It's annoying but I have to laugh. How culture deaf do you have to be, to the rest of the world, to bitch about this?

We go down to our smoking deck and commune with our friends. There's an artist named Erin who lived in Portland for a long time, but who now lives in Mexico. She's *adorable* and charming. She's blonde and eclectic and probably the cheeriest person on the cruise. She is everyone's favorite. There's also Maxine and Jim, George and Pam, and a nice southern woman named Karen, and about a dozen others. We all talk about our tours for the day and just generally chat about everything.

When we finally head for town, it's with very little in our hands and in our pockets: seapass card, credit cards, chapstick, hats and gloves. We know this tour is going to be the highlight of the cruise. We meet the guide on the pier and she directs us to our shuttle. We meet the other 14 passengers as they get on the shuttle, but when we finally leave, the guide says we're missing people. Sucks to be them.

We watch a safety video about the helicopters and the glacier. When we get to the tour building, the guide splits us up in groups of five. We have two women and one man who is a ship crewmember. They give each of us special boots that fit over our shoes and have spikes on the bottom. They put GPS floater belts on us and then they line us up outside near the helicopter landing pads. I am number 1. Robert is 2.

All four helicopters land together. We pile into the helicopter in order and I am directly behind the pilot, who looks like he's 18. It occurs to me I have shoes older than our pilot. We take off as a group of four helicopters all in a line, with about a football field of space between us. The pilot turns the chopper so we are nearly 90 degrees and it feels like we are sideways. The right side door is parallel to the ground. We fly over the Celebrity Solstice and I get some fantastic photos of her from the air.

We go back up the coast a short way and turn left heading into the mountains. The view is stunning. The ocean passage water is an incredible green like a dark Kelley green with milk poured in, and the mountains are covered in snow and stretch for what feels like 600 miles in every direction.

We are flying over these drastic valleys, following the mountain tops in a line of red choppers that somehow feels otherworldly. It feels like we are doing something other than what we're doing. It's as if we are a rescue team headed to search for a lost research group. It feels serious.

As we crest up over a mountain top at 5,000 feet, the cold air drafts catch the helicopter and toss her about. I have the first fluttery butterflies in my stomach and look down, half expecting to see the charred remains of past helicopter tours at the bottom of the ravine below. But the scenery is so breathtaking that I forget to be afraid for long.

The mountains are solid rock and very black, likely some sort of schist. You can see huge quartz veins the width of a house, running down the mountainside like swirled ice cream. The pilot says there are mountain goats up here, and he says it's really lucky for us that it's such a gorgeous day because we might see some. He also says there's going to be turbulence ahead and there's nothing he can do about it. He says the pilots will cherry pick their routes to avoid as much of it as possible, but he says it's unavoidable.

The helicopter starts hitting cold drafts and getting thrown around like a rag doll, dropping suddenly and lurching left to right. You realize how fragile an air vehicle really is, when invisible weather tosses it around in the sky. We fly for about 45 minutes, and both Robert and I are overwhelmed with emotion.

We finally come to an ice field and we see chunks of blue ice floating in the green glacier water.  The glacier is ahead of us and it looks like a huge road coming down out of the mountains. There's dirt and rocks on the ice, which I wasn't expecting. For some reason, I was expecting white snow like an iceburg, with just the white snow and blue ice. I know that's wrong but it still takes me a moment to process that the glacier looks dirty.

We are set down on the ice and run over to our flag. We gather in one big group of 20. When the helicopters leave, we listen to our guide talk about glaciers and Alaska and such. She recently did a stint working at the rock climbing gym in Bend, so we were able to chat about Oregon a bit. Then she tells us we can take walking poles if we like, but she warns us to stick together while we walk around the glacier a bit.

She says the ice is around 600 feet thick, a mile up the glacier pathway, but it's only 25 feet thick where we're standing. There are small creeks of water running downhill and we can see the cerulean blue ice under the top layer. If you've ever been ice fishing, you know how unstable it feels when you see the water under the ice. In this case, the small crevices look eerie and beautiful but I find myself not wanting to step over them.

She leads us to a waterfall that starts on the level we are standing on and pours down into the glacier. It's the first real view we get of the solid ice floe.  The ice is rounded and chalcedony blue and you can see where it has been whittled away by melting water and maybe wind. It's worn holes in the ice down 30 feet or so but it allegedly goes down to the bottom. It suddenly occurs to me: goes to the bottom of what? What's *under* the glacier? Rock? Water? Both? I forget to ask.

At one point, the guide shows us some moss. It's super spongy and she says it's so absorbent, the native Alaskans used it for diapers because it also has natural antibiotic properties. I think it was called Spag moss, or Spaga moss.

We also stop at a bigger creek and everyone lays down to take a drink of the glacier water. Someone asks why we couldn't bring water bottles to fill, and the guide says it's to protect the helicopters. There's complex electronic equipment under the seats and if water spilled there, it would be a very bad thing.

We see a small boulder and the guide explains why it's sitting at an angle. She says the larger stones shade the ice below them, so the ice builds up. When the ice buildup gets big enough, the sun reaches it and melts it, but by then the ice buildup has pushed the stone. So the big stones slowly creep *UPHILL*.

We walk back to the flag, the helicopters come in and land, and the new group gets off and we all get on. Our pilot flies us for 45 minutes through the valleys and over the mountains, explaining the glacier below us at one point are three miles wide. The mountains are covered in Sitka Spruce, which have edible needles on the new growth. There are small green mountain lakes. There are sheer cliffs and glaciers on mountains for hundreds of miles. Hard to imagine it's all part of the Tongass National Rainforest.

Robert is speechless.

When we arrive back at the landing pad, we can't wipe the grins off our faces. It was the best thing either of us have ever done, and Robert has swum in the Dead Sea, so that's saying something.

Next up, the rest of Skagway, the day at sea, and heading to formal night.