Early Sunday morning, Sasha Calvey awoke to a roar.
“I look out of the tent, and then I see a massive wave coming, like, inches away,” Calvey said.
Calvey was camped with two friends, Billy White and Nick Heilgeist, on Harbor Island, an uninhabited islet in Holkham Bay. It’s at the convergence of two of Southeast Alaska’s most-visited fjords, Tracy Arm and Endicott Arm.
Calvey, White and Heilgeist had spent the past 78 days kayaking the Inside Passage from Washington. The three hoped to spend the final two weeks of their trip making their way to Glacier Bay.
It was 5:45 a.m. Sunday when their plans abruptly changed.
Calvey scrambled to wake up White and Heilgeist. The three are professional guides who have been taking a summer off from leading trips through the San Juan Islands. They’d pitched their tent in the woods, far from the high tide line.
They emerged to find much of their gear had vanished, swept away by the rush of water. Calvey’s kayak was floating a quarter mile off shore. White’s rested on a cliff. Heilgeist’s was in a tree.
“It was just pure chaos out of nowhere,” Heilgeist said. “All of it was just gone.”
'Something was really different, and wrong'
Miles away, anchored near the entrance of a fjord known as Fords Terror, Christine White saw water moving backwards. She knew the area well — she’d been taking clients there aboard her small cruise ship, the David B., for nearly two decades. On Sunday, she saw the tide quickly rise and fall by roughly 10 feet.
“When we started seeing the water rising again on what should have been a falling tide, we knew something was really different, and wrong,” she said.
Smith reached out to a seismologist she knew, who consulted with colleagues at the Alaska Earthquake Center and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Smith was onto something. Seismometers across North America had rattled just a few minutes before.
“Honestly, I think of it as the side of a mountain collapsing,” said Michael West, the Alaska state seismologist.
Details of the remote landslide were uncertain in the immediate aftermath, but West said early indications are that a truly impressive amount of rock and debris tumbled down — tens or hundreds of millions of cubic meters.
“We're talking about a cube of rock, that is, you know, a couple football fields on each side,” West said.
A truly colossal tsunami
Southeast Alaska has seen a growing number of fatal landslides near populated areas in recent years. But Sunday’s landslide was something quite a bit different. Rather than a top layer of soil giving way, in this case, large masses of bedrock came down, West said.
When all that rock fell near the end of Tracy Arm, where South Sawyer Glacier reaches tidewater, West said it set off a truly colossal tsunami. One photo, taken by Heilgeist after the trio was rescued by a charter yacht, shows an island deep in the fjord scoured of almost all vegetation.
“We'll get better height estimates in the days to come, but even posts floating around on social media make pretty clear it was at least 100 feet tall in some areas near the source,” West said.
The wave continued to resonate for hours, he said, not unlike water sloshing in a bathtub. It even showed up on a tide gauge in Juneau, 75 miles north and around a few corners, with fluctuations of a foot or so evident several times in the hours after the landslide.
Smith, the captain, said she saw downed trees and scoured shorelines as the David B. made its way up Tracy Arm on Monday. Allen Marine tour boats had to turn around on trips up the fjord on Monday, according to Juneau-based operations manager Stuart MacDonald, though nearby Endicott Arm was free of debris.
Scientists are still trying to put together exactly what happened, and why, West said. He said he expects scientists around the world to study the “quite rare geologic event” for years to come. He compared it to a landslide and 630-foot tsunami that struck Taan Fiord, an arm of Icy Bay 65 miles northwest of Yakutat, in 2015, and said Sunday’s slide was substantially larger than a landslide and tsunami that struck in Kenai Fjords National Park last year.
West spotlighted one early, intriguing piece of evidence — a series of small tremors before the bigger slide.
“Modest earthquakes, but hundreds or thousands of very small ones,” West said. “This landslide had a very clear precursory sequence, and that is not something we have often observed.”
Alaskans were lucky the slide happened when it did, West said. It was early in the morning — around 5:30 a.m. local time — so there weren’t tour boats or cruise ships in the fjord when the mass of rock fell.
“It is hard to imagine that, in front of the landslide itself, anything would survive,” West said.
Tsunamis like this 'won’t always be in remote places'
West said the incident gives scientists a chance to learn more about how massive landslides like Sunday’s happen and what havoc they can wreak.
“We are in the rare position of being able to have these events that don't have truly catastrophic impacts, sometimes just because we can tuck them away in remote places. But they won't always be in remote places,” he said. “What they do present is a phenomenal opportunity to learn and better understand how these things work, so that when it's in Whittier or Seward or Hoonah or Elfin Cove or wherever else, we're better prepared for that.”
For the kayakers, the episode is a reminder that “sometimes, stuff just happens,” Heilgeist said.
The trio was rescued by a charter yacht, the Blackwood, which heard their distress call on a marine radio. A tender fought strong currents as the kayakers loaded what remained of their belongings onto the vessel. The crew welcomed them with blankets and showers, even taking them up Tracy Arm to see the damage the tsunami had left behind.
“Sawyer Island only had one tree left on it,” Heilgeist said.
For White, the entire experience feels “surreal,” she said, but she said the group is holding up well. More than a dozen Juneauites reached out to offer housing or logistical support. And while the group is raising money to replace the lost kayak and gear, White said she’s grateful they escaped any physical harm.
“I’m just glad that we’re all healthy and safe,” White said.
