A word from your National Geographic host

I got my pictures back yesterday from Alaska. I'm one of those dinosaurs that still uses a film camera, but my Nikon takes such awesome pictures, I just can't abandon it. I swear some of the pictures I shot look like something out of a brochure. Of course, it's kind of like trying to take a bad picture of Christie Brinkley - with a subject that gorgeous, you'd have to really be trying for the picture to be less than stunning. I just need to scan some of the pictures in and then I can post them here - maybe I'll get to that this weekend!

In any case, I went around showing my pictures to my co-workers, and they dutifully looked and kinda sorta listened, and I didn't really care if they were paying attention so long as I got to expound on the amazing sites in the pictures and relive it a little bit. Glacier Bay was one of my favorites. What a place. I told them a bunch of what I'd learned about glaciers, thanks to the park rangers that boarded our ship the day we toured Glacier Bay. I know you care, so now I'll tell you some of it.

First off, you'll never get it unless you see it. Pictures can't do Alaksa or a glacier justice, even when they're taken with a fab-o camera like mine. You have to be there. You have to stand on the deck, with cold wind whipping your hair, and ice floating all around in the ocean around you, staring at this giant canyon wall of blue ice. It really is blue, and you'll never see any ice like it unless you're looking at something man-made, and baby, that ain't the same. God and nature did this, and they did it big. You have to hear for yourself the shotgun crack as a piece begins to calve off, eyes searching to see where on the wall of ice something is beginning to slip down. And then you see it - maybe it's just a little pebble of ice tumbling down or maybe it's a whole sheet, slowing shifting, then crashing down into the water, sending waves of slushy ocean water to push against the ship as everyone gasps and involuntarily shouts "Oh!" and "There it is!" It is absolutely awesome.

You wouldn't think watching ice fall would be so moving, but when you really understand what you're looking at it, and how big and powerful it is, and how absolutely special what you're seeing is - it captures you. This isn't TV. This is real. It's nature, putting on a show. And it makes you realize how small and puny we are next to what nature can do. I love it.

Edumacation. Glacier ice is blue because it's denser than most ice. I believe the park ranger told us it's 6 times denser than the ice in your freezer at home. Glacier ice starts as snow that compacts down into ice over time. As the years go by, it compresses more and more until this dense river of ice moves across the landscape, shearing anything in its path. When it reaches the ocean, without the earth underneath it to slide across, the glacier is unable to sustain its weight and begins to break off, or calve, into the water. The land left in the wake of a glacier is a blank slate - scoured of any living thing. And the earth starts over. You can see nature's process in Glacier Bay - land stripped of everything, then life beginning with mosses and such, then more flora and some fauna moving in, and eventually a fully active forest teeming with plant an animal life.

Last night, the National Geographic channel had a show about ice, and after visiting Glacier Bay, I had to watch it. I only made it about halfway, because it was late and I had to go to bed, but this weatherman in Canada was talking about this massive ice storm that occurred in Canada several years ago and the incredible power of nature. With simple water, frozen into ice, nature was able to destroy in one day structures it had taken man decades to build. It wiped out power; broke power line towers; crumpled trees, sending them crashing into cars; made roads impassible. And there wasn't one thing man could do to stop it. All they could do was clean up afterward. He made the point about how powerful nature is, and I thought how true that is. And I'm glad of it. Because not only can nature punch us in the mouth, it can outlast us, and it can fix what we stupid humans destroy.

Eventually, I have no doubt that we humans will destroy ourselves. We'll overpopulate and starve, or we'll blow ourselves up, or we'll have a pandemic that wipes us out - somehow or another, we're going to go the way of the dinosaur. And my, oh my, what we'll leave behind. Quite a mess to clean up. But nature is up to the job.