Cruising Alaska Off-Season — Misty Endicott Arm

As with most of the stops we made on these off-season back-to-back cruises aboard Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas, we visited Endicott Arm twice. And at the end of Endicott arm lies a glacier we had not visited on previous Alaska Cruises — Dawes Glacier. On Cruise 1 our transit of Endicott Arm was cool, damp, and misty, and that’s what you’ll see this week and into next. Starting the middle of next week, the series will show you Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier as they appeared in the sunnier conditions of Cruise 2. After my annual Christmas series for 20 through 24 December, I’ll be returning with one more week of images from Endicott Arm.

Endicott Arm is but one of two steep-walled fiords contained within the Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness. On these back-to-back voyages into this area, we would pass by Tracy Arm and continue on through Endicott Arm to arrive for a brief visit to Dawes Glacier. But before we get to Dawes, let’s look at what happens when glacial fiords meet. The muddy water at the top of the photo below is coming off Tracy Arm, and the green glacial waters below are along Endicott Arm:

Here is another view where the waters from these two fiords merge:

Along our route we encountered both icebergs (larger than 15 meters) and growlers (up to 15 meters in length), and nearly all contained intense blue glacial ice, some of which was clear:

Our first visit to Endicott Arm, during Cruise 1, was 29 September. And when I say it was cool, damp, and misty I mean it was…

Still, every now and then the sun peaked through and lighted patches of the surrounding landscape:

Along the way, watch out for waterfalls too numerous to count:

As you near the end of Endicott Arm, this is where you first glimpse Dawes Glacier:

Ovation of the Seas is a monstrous Quantum-Class cruise ship, with a gross tonnage (a measure of internal volume rather than actual mass) measuring nearly 169,000. As such we could not get really close to Dawes (My next cruise series will be on the even larger Oasis-Class Harmony of the Seas, which we just took in October-November on a transatlantic voyage from Barcelona to Port Canaveral). Still, we did get close enough that I could zoom in for some glacier shots: