ASP Podcast #15: Dan Kowalski & Joe Upton, Surviving a Glacial Tsunami
Dawes Glacier & Endicott Arm fjord
Tsunami story took place on the right of the photo, just beyond the face of the glacier
Dawes Glacier, Endicott Arm
Dawes Glacier
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Show Notes: Spring Patterns & Surviving a Glacial Tsunami
Dan & Joe reflect on seasonal patterns
Preparations for an upcoming season in Alaska
John Muir's quest to experience a living glacier
A story of near-death from a calving tsunami at the Dawes Glacier
Coming close to the Big Black Wings
Deep appreciation and motivations for sharing stories
Music by Christian Arthur
Excerpt from John Muir’s Travels in Alaska; Chapter V; A Cruise in the Cassiar
[The Tlingits with their] eager desire to learn:
"Is that a glacier," they asked, "down in that cañon? And is it all solid ice?"
"Yes."
"How deep is it?"
"Perhaps five hundred or a thousand feet."
"You say it flows. How can hard ice flow?"
"It flows like water, though invisibly slow."
"And where does it come from?"
"From snow that is heaped up every winter on the mountains."
"And how, then, is the snow changed into ice?"
"It is welded by the pressure of its own weight."
"Are these white masses we see in the hollows glaciers also?"
"Yes."
"Are those bluish draggled masses hanging down from beneath the snow-fields what you call the snouts of the glaciers?"
"Yes."
"What made the hollows they are in?"
"The glaciers themselves, just as traveling animals make their own tracks."
"How long have they been there?"
"Numberless centuries," etc. I answered as best I could, keeping up a running commentary on the subject in general, while busily engaged in sketching and noting my own observations, preaching glacial gospel in a rambling way, while the Cassiar, slowly wheezing and creeping along the shore, shifted our position so that the icy cañons were opened to view and closed again in regular succession, like the leaves of a book.
About the middle of the afternoon we were directly opposite a noble group of glaciers some ten in number, flowing from a chain of crater-like snow fountains, guarded around their summits and well down their sides by jagged peaks and cols and curving mural ridges. From each of the larger clusters of fountains, a wide, sheer-walled cañon opens down to the sea. Three of the trunk glaciers descend to within a few feet of the sea-level. The largest of the three, probably about fifteen miles long, terminates in a magnificent valley like Yosemite, in an imposing wall of ice about two miles long, and from three to five hundred feet high, forming a barrier across the valley from wall to wall. It was to this glacier that the ships of the Alaska Ice Company resorted for the ice they carried to San Francisco and the Sandwich Islands, and, I believe, also to China and Japan. To load, they had only to sail up the fiord within a short distance of the front and drop anchor in the terminal moraine.
Another glacier, a few miles to the south of this one, receives two large tributaries about equal in size, and then flows down a forested valley to within a hundred feet or so of sea-level. The third of this low-descending group is four or five miles farther south, and, though less imposing than either of the two sketched above, is still a truly noble object, even as imperfectly seen from the channel, and would of itself be well worth a visit to Alaska to any lowlander so unfortunate as never to have seen a glacier.
“Wherever there were glaciers, the world was in a constant state of creation.”― John Muir