The dining room waiter pulled out my chair and then deftly slid it in as I sat down. I smiled at him as he opened my cloth napkin and laid it on my lap. Such respectful, formal treatment by everyone working in the main cruise ship dining room made me look forward to returning there for all my meals. Besides the sterling service, the food we ordered was, without exception, well prepared and attractively presented.

This morning, we shared our table with fellow travelers, Pat and Lorin. Our conversation centered on how many cruises we’d been on and about the park rangers who were giving talks on the Alaskan wildlife which was to take place in the Crow’s Nest Lounge. The main activity for the day was seeing a glacier close-up. Our cruise ship was to approach within half a mile of the face of the Johns Hopkins Glacier, in the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.

Upon parting from our dining room friends, Tammie and I hurried up to the Crow’s Nest Lounge on deck eleven. Good fortune allowed us to almost immediately find recently vacated deck loungers along the observation windows. The ship was moving slowly now, and tall, rocky land rose up on each side of us. In the distance, we could see snow-covered mountain tops.

The lounge was very large and curved, so I couldn’t see where the ranger was, but he had a microphone so everyone could hear. He explained that Harry Fielding Reid, who discovered this glacier in 1893, named it Johns Hopkins after the university in Baltimore, Maryland. The ranger continued, “The Johns Hopkins Glacier is one of the few advancing tidewater glaciers of the Fairweather Range. Starting on the eastern slopes of Lituya Mountain and Mount Salisbury, it is12 miles long. The face of this glacier is one and a half miles wide.”

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