Walter Jon Williams's Blog

Where’s Wally? Right here, if you want to know.

Wally is the name given a boss humpback in the Prince Rupert Sound, and is easily identified by the two spots on the white ventral surface of its tail fins.

When you’re looking at Wally, Wally is also looking at you. Just a friendly warning.

We have snaked out of the U.S. and back into B.C. MV Imperial Shadow spent the day in Prince Rupert, while we ventured forth to see cetaceans from yet another catamaran.

Again it was a day of miraculous sun. It’s almost drought conditions here, and I’ll return to New Mexico full of tales of the Inside Passage and its balmy subtropical climate. Friends will show up in their tropical shirts and Bermuda shorts, only to spend days with jets of freezing water shooting down their necks.

Eagles and bears are the two critters that most visitors here want to see here in AK— well, maybe I should add whales to the list— but so far my wildlife adventures haven’t achieved greatness.

Here’s an eagle, one of a pair. They were some distance away, but my Canon has a 50-to-one zoom and I was able to get a reasonably coherent image. The problem with the 50:1 is that any movement or hand tremor is going to send the frame dancing all over the place. The Canon has some software that...

Here in the Inside Passage, we’re so far north that the moon’s terminator appears as a vertical line.

The Dawes Glacier was calving like crazy on this warm afternoon, but not when my camera was pointing in the right direction. Here’s the best photo I got: it shows nothing falling but it does show the big splash afterward. The sound was a big BOOM followed by the crash of water as the ice fell.

Harbor seals slept on the floating ice. We saw a pod of harbor porpoises, just sticking their noses up to look at us. (They’re porpoises but they look a lot like dolphins.) Then they vanished...

Another day, another glacier. This is the Dawes Glacier at the end of the Endicott Arm, as viewed from our catamaran.

The weather has been phenomenally good, sunny and in the sixties or the low seventies. The locals tell us how lucky we are not to have Nature hurl buckets of frigid water at our head every twelve seconds.

We continue to defy the odds,

Once we were in Seattle, it seemed only sensible to keep heading northwest, so here we are in Alaska, viewing the Hubbard Glacier from a catamaran. The glacier is 76 miles long and 7 miles wide as it enters Disenchantment Bay. The ice wall is 17 storeys high and extends a further 200 feet under the water.

(Disenchantmenr Bay, by the way, was named by the Spanish explorer Alessandro Malespina in 1722, when he discovered that his promising route to the Northwest Passage was blocked by a ...

This is maybe 5 meters tall. From the Chihuly Museum.

Chihuli Museum, Seattle