by Julie Hatfield

Created on: September 08, 2008   Last Updated: September 09, 2008

Outside Juneau, Alaska - You would think that a "designated wilderness area" would emit nothing but silence, but on the contrary, we're listening to one of the loudest, most impressive sounds we've ever heard in all of our travels. It's the enormous, booming, earth-shattering roar of a glacier calving, or letting go, of a soon-to-be iceberg.

The Tlingit Indians, first inhabitants of this part of southwestern Alaska, call the sound "white thunder," and when you're just yards away from the calving glacier as we are, it's even a little frightening, as the "calf" plunges straight down, like a synchronized swimmer raising her arms above her head, but in this case, as it falls, setting off an enormous spray of water as tall as it was. The white thunder is followed by reverberating roars and a shaking of the ground around our fiord for one or two miles away.

But immediately, we want more of this amazing blue-ice show, so we wait expectantly, holding our breath. Richard Tanner, the expedition leader who has brought a dozen of us up close to the glacier from our yacht, the 145-foot American Safari "Explorer," in a smaller motorboat, yells out to the glacier "My mother has bigger calves than that!" and in an aside to us, "Sometimes, if you insult them, they perform better."

Most of the time, since we're on a relatively small boat (the Explorer holds 36 passengers), we can tuck into smaller inlets and coves that the giant 1000-plus passenger cruise ships can't, and the silence of these places matches the stately, lonely, almost brooding grandeur that is Alaska. American Safari has deliberately used quiet engines on both the main yacht and the motor launches so that we can hear the unique sounds of this giant pristine state when they happen. When we tool around Brothers Islands, part of Admiralty Island National Monument, for example, in the skiff, to get within feet of what Tanner calls "bachelor land," where hundreds of male Steller sea lions haul out of the water to lounge on the outcroppings, we are close enough to hear their grunting, which if you close your eyes (and hold your nose; they stink) sounds very much like a group of chanting Tibetan monks.

The composer John Luther Adams, who lives in Fairbanks, thinks that his state is positively crammed with noise, and holds many layers of sounds that, to his ears, are music. To prove it, he has fed information from seismological, meteorological and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska into a computer and transformed

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