Glacier Bay National Park—A giant, hollow breath, deep as a crevasse, breaks the predawn quiet.
Just off the lip of the shallow, rocky beach where my tent is pitched, a 40-ton behemoth is feeding at 4 a.m. The flat brightness, a civil twilight, looks like the same light I fell asleep to the night before.
The next exhalation sounds like it’s 10 feet away. I unzip my rainfly just in time to see the dissipating spume as the humpback moves on, leaving a squabble of seabirds in its wake.
Less than 12 hours before, my co-worker Lewis Leung, his partner, Ruby Tam, and I had pulled into a tiny cove after a grueling three-mile paddle up the coast into a stiff headwind and against a powerful ebb tide. We pitched our tents in a bed of egg-sized rocks, ate dinner in the intertidal zone, and fell into an exhausted sleep by 8 p.m.
