The Ice Sirens

In the epic tale 'The Odyssey', written by Homer (the epic Greek poet, not the yellow cartoon character), one part of Odysseus' eleven year voyage from Troy back to Ithaca takes him past the land of the Sirens, female creatures who sat on the rocks and with their alluring singing, would irresistibly draw sailors toward them, where they would crash on the rocks and meet their doom. Odysseus managed to avoid this fate by putting wax in the ears of his crew and they in turn lashed him to the mast before they sailed past.

Our kayaking odyssey in Glacier Bay was a tad shorter: seven days. Only here, the Sirens of Glacier Bay are made of ice: tidewater glaciers - alluring and potentially deadly for those who fail to heed the warnings and stray too close, only to have them calve, bringing down tons of ice onto your head or creating a wave capable of capsizing a kayak, should you be foolish enough to venture too close.

The inlets here are most appropriate amphitheatres for holding an audience with these sirens. Massive fjords with imposing granite walls, they provide ideal acoustics, but offer no clue to the scale of the venue. Rather than being drawn by their voice, we were drawn by their stunning beauty. If anything, their voices were quite frightening - they sounded more like Zeus, god of thunder, with frequent tumultuous crashes resonating through the fjord as gargantuan pillars of ice groaned and shifted within them; massive crystaline dominoes teetering against each other. But drawn to them we still were.

Our most fabulous encounter with these sirens was heading around the point of John Hopkins' inlet, when we first saw its namesake glacier. Already an imposing siren as we went around the point at the head of the inlet, yet it took us two and half hours of paddling to get within two kilometers of it. We spent an hour there in our kayaks, listening and watching, and occasionally getting to watch a tantrum of fantastic violence as an ice block was sent crashing into the waters below. An of course, in order to get close, we had to navigate the inlet through the corpses of these ice blocks: icebergs large and small, strewn about by the winds and currents. An intruder in the form of a tour boat passed us and headed closer, and only then were we able to get a sense of scale of the scene before us.

A truly memorable spectacle, and we had great weather for the duration of our visit to this mythic land.