The Seward Highway and Portage Glacier

On Sunday, August 7, we headed south from Anchorage to meet our cruise ship, Holland America’s MS Statendam.  The route we took was along what National Geographic has deemed one of the world’s fifty ultimate road trips, the Seward Highway.

Along the way, we stopped just long enough to take a mini cruise to the Portage Glacier, with its stunningly beautiful blue glacial ice and the surrounding mountains with myriad cascading waterfalls at nearly every turn.  The water in the Turnagain Arm, where this glacier is located, had a greenish-gray cast from “glacial flour,” pulverized stone so fine that it stays in suspension in the water rather than precipitating out to the bottom.

The tops of the nearby mountains were shrouded in ghostly wisps of clouds that flowed over the rock and cascaded silently down the slopes, some of which were barren granite while others were clad in emerald vegetation.

This one stop alone was well worth the trek to Alaska, the cold damp, the cloudy skies, and the interminable rain that had marred much of our visit to date.  Even though poor conditions continued to nip at our heels while a fine, chilling mist descended upon us, the photographic opportunities still managed to overcome.  No direct sunlight was needed to capture the chillingly cool blues of the ice field, and only minimal post processing was needed to bring out a true and accurate representation of what we beheld that cold summer day.

Presented below is a small sampling of the sights that opened up to us on this excursion.