Hawk in front of the Amalia Glacier
14 January 2008 | Caleta Amalia, Estero Amalia, Chile
Feliz A�o Nuevo! We are anchored in a most amazing anchorage, and we have enjoyed the most wonderful day. Hawk is swinging to her anchor in Caleta Amalia within sight of the Amalia Glacier. The whole of the glacier can be seen from on deck, two rivers of blue and white ice that surge down two mountain valleys, twisting and turning around the rugged snow-capped peak that separates them. They converge at the bottom in a single field of crevassed blue ice where glacier meets sea in a wall almost two miles wide and well more than 100 feet high.
The Amalia Glacier is just one of dozens that reach the sea in this central area of the Chilean channels, all flowing out of the 16,000 square kilometer Southern Patagonian Ice Cap (Campo de Hielo Sur) which lies draped across the Andes from about 48�30'S to 51�30'S. The proximity of 10,000 foot high Andean peaks to the sea and the almost constant precipitation along this stretch of the coast produces vast snowfields that blanket the peaks and feeds the long rivers of ice that follow the valleys downward on both the Chilean and the Argentinean sides of the border. In Argentina, the glaciers have created large lakes, but on the Chilean side they meet the sea which has invaded the valleys between the peaks in long, winding fjords. For almost 180 miles along this part of the coast, if you pick a wide fjord that heads east, you will eventually come to a glacier. But most of those glaciers lie up 30-mile long fjords that afford no shelter to a yacht, and the winds funnel down off the mountains in great gusts that carry ice out of the fjords while making it difficult for a sailboat to reach the glacier face.
Estero Amalia, the ten-mile long fjord with the Amalia glacier at its head, is the first to open off a much larger channel called Estero Peel. After Amalia leaves it to the south, Estero Peel runs northeast for another twenty miles before splitting into two arms each of which extend an additional twenty miles into the heart of the Andes. Almost all of the many arms that open up off of Estero Peel terminate in sea level glaciers, and dozens of other glaciers can be seen spilling down from the higher peaks of the interior. When Tilman decided to climb the Southern Patagonian ice cap he chose to do it from Estero Peel. He arrived here aboard his sailboat, Mischief, with a crew to watch the boat. He found so much ice in Amalia that he could not reach the anchorage where we are now sitting. He was gone for several weeks, and the crew he left on the boat had to keep moving from anchorage to anchorage as the ice shifted around them. At one point, they were embayed, trapped, and in getting away a large growler damaged the propeller of the boat so that the motor could no longer be used. When Tilman returned to the vessel after having successfully crossed the ice cap, they had to sail out through the convoluted channels some forty miles to the Pacific before running north offshore to reach a port where they could make repairs.
Amalia is considered one of the most accessible glaciers in the area. Estero Amalia runs southeast for ten miles after opening off of Peel before swinging to the east for another five and terminating in the ice field in front of the glacier face. The entire fjord is deep and free of dangers. Just where the fjord turns to the east, a protected anchorage lies on the western shore affording a perfect view of the entire glacier from the peaks that feed the twin arms to the blue and white where ice meets the sea. This is the only anchorage within sight of a glacier on this stretch of the coast, and only one of two in all of the Chilean channels.
Amalia may be accessible, but that does not mean that it is always easy to get to, as Tilman's experience demonstrates. Even if ice conditions allow an approach to the glacier face, the 300 days of rain a year in this area make the chances of really seeing the glacier pretty small. Strong southwesterly winds can make it difficult to get down the fjord to the glacier; strong westerly winds can make it difficult to get back out Estero Peel to the main channels heading north and south. This is the second time we have tried to reach the Amalia Glacier. When we were on our way south in November of 2002, a strong southerly wind had blown a huge amount of ice out of the fjord and into Estero Peel. None of the pieces were very large, but they were densely spread across the channel, and we could not begin to find a way through - we didn't even make it into Estero Amalia from Estero Peel.
Yesterday when we reached Estero Peel, there wasn't so much as an ice cube to be seen. It was so completely different neither of us could quite believe it. Though it was overcast, the clouds were high enough that we could see the tops of most of the peaks bordering the channel. As we entered Caleta Amalia, we were greeted by a pod of Peale's dolphins. We could only see them when they surfaced because the glacial melt water was opaque, with the milky color that comes from the rock, silt and sand deposited by the glacier as it retreats. The dolphins stayed with us all the way down the ten-mile long fjord, and we were starting to think we might make it all the way to the glacier face. But then we sighted a line of white that started at the headland that still hid the glacier from us. When we reached it, it proved to be a densely packed covering of ice cube- to furniture-sized pieces of ice that had been trapped in that end of the bay by the last week of strong northerly winds. We motored up to the pack ice and then paralleled it, trying to get the best angle on the glacier. As we went, ice bumped and scraped along Hawk's sides, much louder than it seemed possible such little pieces of ice could be. Though we were some five miles away, we couldn't get any closer to the glacier face. But we were not disappointed. We motored to the anchorage facing the glacier and dropped the anchor, enjoying the glacier from a distance.
Today we had a forecast for light southwest winds which usually means at least some sunshine. We woke to hard rain and temperatures in the low forties, but as the day progressed, sunshine alternated with squalls. Every time the sun came out, I popped out on deck to look around. When it was sunny over the boat, heavy clouds had crept down to completely cover the glacier; when it was sunny over the glacier it was raining hard over the boat. By 5:00 in the evening, I had given up and was hard at work on an article when Evans went out on deck. He called down to me a few minutes later, "I don't know where all the ice has gone, but we could get within a half mile of the glacier face right now if you want to." Within ten minutes we had the anchor up and were motoring across the fjord toward the glacier with the dolphins once again gamboling in our bow wave. Evans was right - in just 24 hours, the ice that had completely blocked us the day before had all but disappeared, and we were able to go three and a half miles further than the day before. Just as we reached the pack ice at the foot of the glacier, the clouds parted and we were given the gift of an hour of bright sunlight.
I climbed into the dinghy to take pictures of the boat in front of the glacier. Once in the dinghy, I got a little away from the boat and turned off the engine. The dolphins were circling around me, surfacing within less than ten feet, and their sudden sharp exhalations sounded like the sea breathing. I was surrounded by icebergs shining bright blue and green in the sunshine, and I could hear the water lapping gently up under their worn edges, a sound like bathwater moving around in a bathtub. In the background, the distant echo of whitewater came to me from the dozen waterfalls running down the bare rock face swept clean by the retreating glacier. And in front of me, Hawk was dwarfed by the wall of ice rising up above her mast, a pale blue and white wall shot through with the hard cobalt blue of the open ocean. Though the boat and the glacier face were in bright sunshine, dark clouds hovered over the mountains behind the glacier, curling and coiling in the light breeze like smoke. As the clouds passed by, the sun came and went, first reflecting off the glacier in a white dazzle and then catching a deep blue crevasse and making it shimmer as if it were lit from within.
I had been taking pictures for forty minutes when Evans called, "You'd better get back to the boat. We're about to get rained on." I looked over my shoulder to see that a black squall had dragged a curtain of rain across the entire fjord. I turned back and snapped my last picture, and only when I looked at it later did I see that I had caught a dolphin surfacing off Hawk's quarter and an iceberg right by her bow in a photo that looks as if it could only have been created on the computer. I got back to the boat and we got the dinghy back on board, and then the rain came in a cold, soaking deluge. The dolphins went with us as we left the glacier face, and one even leaped right out of the water within five feet of the bow of the boat, looking startled to see the boat bearing down upon him. When we got back to the anchorage and dropped anchor, the dolphins swam around the boat for another fifteen minutes as if hoping that we would come out to play once again.
What a wonderful day in a magnificent place...
Hope whatever you've been dreaming of proves worth the wait,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk