Sailing up to the glacier’s edge in Glacier Bay, Alaska on the elegant SS Arcadia, proud member of the P & O fleet, sadly no longer with us.

Arcadia entered Glacier Bay on June 1st 1970 and was the largest ship ever to have sailed in these waters on this first Alaskan Cruise.  Here is the entry in the diary I kept during that remarkable summer, a summer that still remains fresh in my memory:

“Monday 1st of June: The climax to the whole cruise – Glacier Bay. How to describe the beauty of this awe inspiring scene. We felt we had arrived at the end of the world. Nothing but these magnificent mountain peaks, the silence and us. Slowly we moved round the bay exploring its hidden most channels, gliding up to the glacial faces, blasting the ship’s horn in the hope that we might produce an icefall – with no result other than the echo reverberating about us for a full minute. We saw seals playfully swimming beside us. I think there was no one who wasn’t moved by the sight. The sheer unexplored natural beauty that surrounded us is something we shall never forget.”

A little technical information about the images, which are from the Kodachrome slides I took using my first SLR camera, a Pentax Spotmatic. The slides, and there are many of them, remain as pristine today as the day they were developed in 1970. I scanned them into my laptop using an Epson Perfection V700 Photo Scanner and then processed them using Photoshop Elements.