I think it’s Tuesday

The days all run together out here. Today is another pretty nice day, weather-wise.  It’s even calmer seas than yesterday, and mostly sunny outside.  

Our first station today was a re-visit of one from the other day where we only trawled, so this time we just did the oceanography stuff.  We have three more full stations today, then if all goes well, we’re going to tuck into Icy Bay tonight for some sightseeing.  I hope this nice weather holds for that.

Later – what a gorgeous, incredible night.  We grilled salmon and steaks for dinner, and took a cruise around Icy Bay.  The ginormous Giyot glacier feeds into the bay in three spots, so there are icebergs all over.   

The glacier really is huge – it must be dozens of miles from end to end (all the white you see in the photo above is glacier!). The closest we got to one arm was about 3.5 miles, but it looked so close.  The face must be hundreds of feet high.  On one of the other arms there were dozens of waterfalls cascading down the mountain face, from the glacier.  

Mount St. Elias is the 2^nd tallest mountain in Alaska.  It’s 18008 feet.  We had an on-and-off view all day while sampling, as the clouds came and went.  This is Mt. St. Elias, as the sun was starting to set:

There was one iceberg that rolled over while we were out there, revealing a dirty side that we didn’t see on the way in:

 Finally, heading back out of the bay at sunset.  Back to work in the morning...