No other glacier on this trip could compare to Hubbard, so what was there for an encore? We traveled 500 miles North to Prince William Sound. There were tall mountains in all directions, areas so wild and rugged they looked as if no human could have explored them and survived. In the distance was Valdez. We spotted several oil tankers on the horizon, but really no other signs of modern development.
As hours went by, I wondered why we were passing glaciers without stopping. Then we entered, College Fjord. It is the home for the most tightly clustered collection of glaciers in Alaska, 16 in all. Most of this group is named after Ivy League schools that originally funded an expedition there in 1899. There was Yale, Columbia, and the largest Harvard. It was the nicest weather of our voyage, so we hung around Harvard Glacier quite awhile. This glacier was much less blue than Hubbard, but more streaked. Dark bands in the ice showed areas where rocks and dirt had been scoured from distant mountains and carried by the flowing glacier. The prominent center streak seen in some of these pictures is known as the “medial moraine”.
