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To Petermann Island and Back (Chart)
There are actually two route traces shown here, almost on top of each other. We went south, through the Lemaire Channel, to Petermann Islans, and then retrraced the path.
On the way back through the Lemaire Channel, several of us were put down down in the small boats and had a water-level-eye view of the trip. It was a narrow channel with high walls of rock and ice on both sides, with an occasonal small penguin colony here and there. There were medium-size of chunks of floating ice drifting down the channel, a few of them with seals sleeping on them.
On a clear day, they would have been an unforgetable experience for the beauty and strangeness of the place. On this day, it was foggy, snowy, and cold -- unforgetable, but not in a totally good way.
The small penguin colonies are mentioned above. There was one thing about them that was evident here (and in a few other places) that I did not capture in a photo (and I;m not sure it is possible to capture). Saw some of them at an elevations perhaps 100 to 200 feet above the water, in steep areas that were almost like cliff faces. It seemed amazing that such awkward, clumsy-looking creatures could walk (or climb) up the steep paths that SEEMED to be the only way they could reach these locations. Could be there were alternative (less steep) ways to get to where they were, but, if so, it was not obvious.
