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| 1st iceberg we spotted |
We drove over 100 miles and turned
at the Whittier turnoff. Down the road was Portage Glacier so we decided to stop there for the night. We stayed
at the National Park for the night. Luckily for us Skip is “old”
so we only had to pay $6.50 for our camping site. It of course was out in the
middle of the forest. Bear “poop” was found in our site and Moose
tracks were next to the bathroom. We did not see any of the wildlife but we were
aware that they were there. In the morning, we drove the 2 ½ miles to Portage
Lake where we took a boat tour of the Portage Glacier. Again as luck would have it we got a discount because Skip was “old”. The tour was only one hour. We did see the glacier calving. Calving is when icebergs fall off the glacier.
There were lots of icebergs floating in the water. Everyone told us not to take
the tunnel to Whittier so another turn of events was to venture back down to Seward!
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| Portage Glacier |
If you note in the glaciers and the icebergs you can see beautiful blues. The blue is caused by the sun.
Here is what I read in the brochure: Glacier ice is formed under the weight of countless waterfalls, which squeeze out
most of the air, leaving dense, compact ice. Sunlight, or white light, is made up of all the colors of th espectrum---with
each color having a different amount of energy. In regular ice, like the ice in your freezer, the air bubbles scatter
the light---creating the white appearance. When sunlight strikes glacier ice, the lower energy colors are absorbed by
the ice and only the blue color, which has the most energy, is reflected to the eye! (USDA Chugach National Forest publication).
And there you have the information you wanted about why the ice is blue!!!
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