It’s Wednesday, 14 May and I find myself sitting outside on the deck of our room as we slowly enter the Tracy Arm Fjord. It is approximately 42 degrees outside, and the precipitation drizzles just enough to get you wet to the bone after a while without you realizing it. Seventy five percent of the year the weather is like this, either in the form of rain or snow. With the weather like it is, I can see why so few people wish to make this part of the world their home. Nonetheless, there is a striking beauty to thei the scenery and even as cold and uncomfortable as the weather makes it, it is beautiful. The fjord is said to drop down from each shore to approximately 1000 feet. The walls of the fjord are virtually vertical and made of pure granite. As we pass by these sheer cliffs, you can see the horizontal striations that were made when this area was covered in ice and the Tracy Arm Glacier extended out to what is now the open sea. Even though the cliffs are made of solid granite, they bear the black stains of a millennium of runoff water and other growths on the rocks. With the overcast weather we are experiencing it is a little difficult to really appreciate the grandeur of these mountains but they have a certain steely ruggedness that must be seen to be understood. As we pass the stately walls of this fjord I can’t help but be taken in by the hundreds, if not thousands of waterfalls that fall hundreds of feet from the feet of melting snow and ice fields that shroud the cliff tops. Many of these cascades fall in the form of rushing torrents, while so many more appear as thin threads of water dissecting each cliff wall. I wonder if they ever cease, or is the snow so everlasting that they remain year-round. Occasionally punctuating these encroaching walls is another prehistoric glacial sluice that extends into the frozen interior. Unable to see the head of these bowl shaped canyons, I can only surmise that they extend into the eternities. But reality bites and I conclude that another world possibly never seen by the eyes of man exists where life and death goes on and the measure of creation is repeated annually with the seasons.
God Lives here. I am humbled by the grandeur of his blessings, large and small.
