Mobile Menu

  • Destinations
    • Canada
      • British Columbia
        • Vancouver Island, B.C.
        • Okanagan
        • Lower Mainland, B.C.
        • Northern B.C.
        • Interior B.C.
        • Kootenays/Rockies
      • Alberta
      • Yukon
      • Northwest Territories
    • U.S.A.
      • Alaska
      • Washington
      • Oregon
      • California
    • West Coast Galleries
  • Experiences
    • Things To Do
    • Staycation Secrets
      • Canada
      • U.S.A.
    • Adventure
      • Adrenaline
      • Beaches
      • Biking
      • Camping
      • Fishing
      • Hiking
      • Hunting and Fishing
      • Rafting
      • Skiing
    • Sip & Savour
    • Family Activities
    • Indigenous Tourism
    • Accessible Travel
    • Travel Tips & Advisories
  • West Coast Galleries
    • Nature Photography
    • Wildlife Photography
    • Cityscapes
  • Contests
    • Autumn Escape
    • Amateur Photographer of the Year 2023
  • About
    • The Armchair Traveller Newsletter
    • Explore our travel guides
    • Impressive West Coast
    • West Coast Partners
    • West Coast Traveller Directory
    • Join Our Team
    • Contact Us
    • Explore West Coast Traveller on TikTok
  • Search
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • TikTok Icon
  • Flickr Icon
  • Menu
  • Skip to left header navigation
  • Skip to right header navigation
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Before Header

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • TikTok Icon
  • Flickr Icon

West Coast Traveller

  • Destinations
    • Canada
      • British Columbia
        • Vancouver Island, B.C.
        • Okanagan
        • Lower Mainland, B.C.
        • Northern B.C.
        • Interior B.C.
        • Kootenays/Rockies
      • Alberta
      • Yukon
      • Northwest Territories
    • U.S.A.
      • Alaska
      • Washington
      • Oregon
      • California
    • West Coast Galleries
  • Experiences
    • Things To Do
    • Staycation Secrets
      • Canada
      • U.S.A.
    • Adventure
      • Adrenaline
      • Beaches
      • Biking
      • Camping
      • Fishing
      • Hiking
      • Hunting and Fishing
      • Rafting
      • Skiing
    • Sip & Savour
    • Family Activities
    • Indigenous Tourism
    • Accessible Travel
    • Travel Tips & Advisories
  • West Coast Galleries
    • Nature Photography
    • Wildlife Photography
    • Cityscapes
  • Contests
    • Autumn Escape
    • Amateur Photographer of the Year 2023
  • About
    • The Armchair Traveller Newsletter
    • Explore our travel guides
    • Impressive West Coast
    • West Coast Partners
    • West Coast Traveller Directory
    • Join Our Team
    • Contact Us
    • Explore West Coast Traveller on TikTok
  • Search
You are here: Home / Travel / Alaska glacier visit begins with pint-sized wildlife encounter

Courtesy Photo/ Ned Rozell

Tree trunks that La Perouse Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve ran over in the 19th century.

Alaska glacier visit begins with pint-sized wildlife encounter

February 22, 2022 //  by Black Press Media Staff

Share this:

Ned Rozell, science writer, University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute.

During our first lunch at a blue-gravel campsite near this Alaska glacier named after a French explorer, scientist Ben Gaglioti and I had a visitor.

As we sat on bleached slabs of wood, I held in my left hand a rectangular cracker with peanut butter smeared on top.

We heard a loud buzz. A hummingbird hovered in front of my cracker. As I held still, the hummingbird probed the peanut butter, twice, with its needle beak. The cracker transferred the vibration to my left hand, tickling my fingers.

Courtesy Photo/ Ned Rozell A rufous hummingbird visits a campsite near La Perouse Glacier, on the outer Pacific coast of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.

As the bird zoomed off, I looked over at Ben to confirm the experience.

“I think you have superpowers now,” he said.

So began our 11-day visit to this glacier on the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. It is a place of many bears, the thunder of blue ice falling and a thumb-size bird that got its first taste of peanut butter.

Gaglioti was there to continue exploring a “ghost forest” he and others had discovered a few years earlier. He studies ancient landscapes for his job as an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Water and Environmental Research Center.

This ghost forest, a few hundred yards from the swollen tongue of La Perouse Glacier, is where we camped.

We suspended our food in dry bags using a rope we had thrown over a thick grey stem that was once a towering Sitka spruce, bristling with thousands of with vibrant green needles. That was before the glacier ran it over.

Gaglioti and his colleagues — including UAF’s Dan Mann and Greg Wiles of the College of Wooster in Ohio — used tree corers to learn when these trees died, which told them about how long ago the glacier advanced to shear the mighty stems.

The scientists matched the growth rings with still-living rainforest trees nearby. They found that La Perouse Glacier bulldozed these trees some time between 1850 to 1866.

* * *

After a year of pandemic-related absence, Gaglioti was happy to scramble back up the giant boulders of an outlet creek to La Perouse Glacier. Explorer William Dall in 1874 named the glacier for the French ship commander who sailed here in 1786. La Perouse fled Alaska soon after he lost 21 men to tidal currents at the mouth of nearby Lituya Bay. He named the island in the bay Cenotaph, a word meaning “empty tomb.”

Gaglioti wanted to tease out what these trees, run over during a cold period known as the Little Ice Age, can tell us about how the forest responds to extreme changes in climate. Not just the warming we are feeling now, but the extreme temperature swings that have happened many times in the past.

[A trip to Southeast’s ghost forests]

Those dead trees we camped amid — some of them 600 years old when the glacier clipped them — hold a long-term record in their growth rings. The scientists compare them with the record stored in live trees, among them giant spruce, hemlock and Alaska yellow cedars that germinated high enough to be safe from the glacier’s advances.

Courtesy Photo/ Ned Rozell Ben Gaglioti walks to a ghost forest near the tongue of La Perouse Glacier, which ran over the trees during the Civil War.

Gaglioti will use dendrochronology — taking pencil-thin cores of live and dead trees as well as slices of dead cedars he removed with a handsaw — to see how trees reacted to temperature changes due to the proximity of the ever-moving ice.

At the hummingbird campsite of dead, grey trees and fine gravel shaded green by a few pioneer plants, we often felt the cold breath of the nearby glacier; in midsummer, we ate dinner while wearing wool caps.

Gaglioti thinks the retreat of the glacier combined with the recent warming of Alaska air temperatures may be a double dose of increased heat to which the trees are responding. Their reaction may be a predictor for how trees all over Southeast are responding to global warming and its possible acceleration.

To gather information, Gaglioti and I hiked the thick, soft, slippery rainforest nearby to gather temperature sensors he installed in dead trees and the ground a few years ago. He also cored a few dozen trees, and, with a handsaw blade of Japanese steel, cut a few biscuits of wood he will bring back to UAF to study in detail.

With grizzly-bear sign light and blue sky overhead, we took our close encounter with the hummingbird as a promise of good things ahead. We had 11 more days to spend in a place with no boot prints except those of our own Xtratufs.

• Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. This year is the institute’s 75th anniversary. Ned Rozell ned.rozell@alaska.edu is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.

Share this:

Category: TravelTag: Alaska, Outdoors, Outdoors and Recreation, USA, Wildlife

Related Posts

You may be interested in these posts from the same category.

5 fun ways to celebrate the 2023 Calgary Stampede!

Touted as the ‘Greatest Show on Earth,’ the 2023 Calgary Stampede celebration promises to be…

5 fun ways to celebrate the 2023 Calgary Stampede!Read More

Ticket to ride: Southern California theme parks roll out new attractions for summer

By Pam Kragen, The San Diego Union-Tribune And they’re off. Theme park season is officially…

Ticket to ride: Southern California theme parks roll out new attractions for summerRead More

2 kokanee lake fisheries come to Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island anglers no longer need to travel to the B.C. Mainland to fish for…

2 kokanee lake fisheries come to Vancouver IslandRead More

Chilliwack Mural Festival returns bigger, bolder in its 3rd year

The Chilliwack Mural Festival is going to be bigger, bolder and more beautiful than ever…

Chilliwack Mural Festival returns bigger, bolder in its 3rd yearRead More

Victoria International Airport increases accessibility with autism resource kit

The Victoria International Airport is increasing accessibility with the launch of an autism resource kit.…

Victoria International Airport increases accessibility with autism resource kitRead More

Visiting Mount St. Helens is inspiring and alarming all at once

‘This is it.’ In March 1980, Washington’s Mount St. Helens rumbled awake. A series of…

Visiting Mount St. Helens is inspiring and alarming all at onceRead More

Guided June hikes explore old-growth forests in seven Kootenay communities

Wildsight, a non-profit working to protect biodiversity and encourage sustainable communities, is offering guided walks…

Guided June hikes explore old-growth forests in seven Kootenay communitiesRead More

Parks Canada plans major rewrite of more than 200 historic site plaques

They’re affixed to old buildings where someone important used to live. Or they’re mounted on…

Parks Canada plans major rewrite of more than 200 historic site plaquesRead More

Victoria International Airport welcomes new airline with Friday Harbor route

Victoria International Airport (YYJ) has welcomed a new airline. Kenmore Air now provides the only…

Victoria International Airport welcomes new airline with Friday Harbor routeRead More

Previous Post: « Moguls, mulligans + mountain bikes: As winter greets spring, discover Kamloops
Next Post: Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival marks 25th anniversary »

Primary Sidebar

Things To Do

5 fun ways to celebrate the 2023 Calgary Stampede!

June 7, 2023

Ticket to ride: Southern California theme parks roll out new attractions for summer

June 7, 2023

2 kokanee lake fisheries come to Vancouver Island

June 6, 2023

Chilliwack Mural Festival returns bigger, bolder in its 3rd year

June 6, 2023

Recent Posts

5 fun ways to celebrate the 2023 Calgary Stampede!

June 7, 2023

Ticket to ride: Southern California theme parks roll out new attractions for summer

June 7, 2023

2 kokanee lake fisheries come to Vancouver Island

June 6, 2023

Chilliwack Mural Festival returns bigger, bolder in its 3rd year

June 6, 2023

Footer

The West Coast Traveller has an immense social media footprint, with eight social media sites and and 125,000+ social followers.

Join us on social media and Join Our Community by sharing your stuff!

Get Inspired

News Media Groups

Black Press Media
Sound Publishing
Oahu Media Group
Alaska
Boulevard Magazines
Used.ca

Let’s Get Social

West Coast Traveller
I Love British Columbia
I Love Alberta
I Love Yukon
I Love Northwest Territories
I Love Washington
I Love California
I Love Oregon
I Love Alaska

Visit Our Companion Sites

I Love Saskatchewan
I Love Manitoba
I Love Nunavut
I Love Ontario
I Love Quebec
I Love Newfoundland and Labrador
I Love Nova Scotia
I Love New Brunswick
I Love Prince Edward Island

Site Footer

  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • TikTok Icon

Copyright © 2023 West Coast Traveller and · All Rights Reserved