End-times tourism in the land of glaciers

GLACIER Bay National Park and Preserve is one of those Alaska showpieces more often seen by visitors than by the state’s residents. When I finally got there this summer, after more than 40 years living in Alaska, I arrived the way most people do, onboard a cruise ship, in the company of a few thousand tourists from around the world.

The remote park’s lofty summits and ice-carved fjords, the humpbacks and orcas and grizzlies, lived up to what I’d heard. As passengers spilled onto the upper observation deck, agog, the ship’s theatrical pirouette before a wall of blue glacial ice showed off Romantic nature in all its timeless glory.

Something was amiss, though, at least for me. I was along for the trip as an invited local speaker – Alaska author and freelance wilderness rhapsodist. But during my decades in Alaska, I had seen too many changes, interviewed too many climate scientists, read (well, skimmed) too many studies. I gazed from the railing with a contemporary Alaskan’s gloom, a pilgrim bearing witness to end-times in the temple of the glaciers.