Petersburg, Alaska -- What's missing from this picture? We're paddling up a misty fjord toward a creaking blue glacier, weaving our way around icebergs the color of an Arctic wolf's eyes. Ribbony waterfalls streak the steep granite walls. Nobody is watching us but bald eagles and curious, doe-eyed seals.

Here's what's missing: cruise ships. If this were Glacier Bay, we'd be sharing this Pleistocene tableaux with -- and paddling hard to stay out of the path of -- the flotilla of 80,000-ton leviathans that sails up and down the bay all summer.

But this is LeConte Glacier Bay, a miniature Glacier Bay 150 miles to the south, and the only vessels here are half a dozen sea kayaks the color of jelly beans. Too narrow for the big ships to turn around in and usually choked by icebergs, the fjord remains pristine and untouched, virtually identical to the way it looked when naturalist John Muir paddled up it in 1880.

That's what brought me here. Years ago, when friends and I spent a week kayaking around Glacier Bay, we expended considerable effort dodging the big cruise liners and breathing their fumes. At one point, we paddled up to the Reid Glacier and, as we were contemplating the view, an impossibly enormous cruise ship parked itself between us and the glacier. It was like taking a seat in a movie theater and having a woman with an eight-story-high hairdo sit in front of you.

Current National Park Service regulations allow 139 ships into Glacier Bay during the short summer season, and the park service is studying the possibility of increasing the number to 184. That's great for cruisers, but awful news for paddlers. (Virtually all the traffic heads up the bay's West Arm. Kayakers fare much better in the East, or Muir, Arm, but the famous tidewater glaciers are fewer and farther between there.)

All this is by way of explaining how I came to be strolling down the docks in the friendly little salmon-fishing town of Petersburg, Alaska, last summer, duffel in hand. Bobbing at the end of the dock was my ride -- a 1959 DeHavilland Beaver float plane. We were off to a good start: Any trip that involves a float plane is by definition a romantic adventure.

The guided trip I'd signed up for was really two trips in one: the float plane would drop us off near the mouth of Big Creek on Kupreanof Island for a few days of paddling among humpback whales, then pick us up and fly us to the head of LeConte Glacier Bay to explore icebergs and glaciers.

Few places are better suited to sea kayaking than the sheltered waters of southeast Alaska. It's been this way for quite some time. In a museum in Juneau, I once saw an Aleut Indian kayak that was more than 300 years old and realized that, except for the materials and rudder, it was identical to the ones we paddle today.

Aleuts enslaved by Russian fur traders first brought sea kayaks to these waters. "They were ideal for hunting, because you rode silently and low down in the water," said our guide, Scott Roberge. "For that same reason, they're perfect for animal-watching."

It says something about the growing popularity of the sport that everyone on our trip, from a recent high school graduate to the retired commander of a U.S. Navy destroyer, had paddled before.

After hopping out of the float plane and wading ashore like Gen. Douglas MacArthur returning to the Philippines, we found Big Creek Camp in a dripping forest of hemlock and Sitka spruce. It was so well hidden from the beach that on later excursions the only way I could find it was by looking for the enormous bald eagles' nest atop a crag at water's edge. Big walk-in tents and the communal kitchen/campfire/dining area were covered by a vast canopy of tarps strung from trees -- a godsend in ever-drizzly southeast Alaska.

Kupreanof Island, named for a Russian naval officer, lies at the confluence of three sounds -- Frederick, Stephens and Chatham. Tides surging through these channels stir up the nutrient-rich bottom, attracting humpback whales who gorge on plankton and krill each summer before migrating south to Hawaii or Mexico.

We hadn't even put our paddles in the water before we saw our first whale. We watched from the gravel beach as a 45-foot humpback flung itself out of the water again and again, landing with a colossal splash. And then, apparently tiring of these cetaceous belly flops, it floated on its back and spent 15 minutes slapping the water over and over with its 20-foot-long pectoral fins. Researchers have theories about why whales do these things, but no one knows for sure.

For a closer look, we sealed ourselves into our fiberglass kayaks -- pretty much as the Aleut seal hunters once did -- and paddled out through gentle swells toward the center of the sound. On a big rock, three otter pups basked in the sunshine, looking Disney-cute. Four 800-pound Steller sea lions announced themselves with a chorus of raspy exhalations before diving under the surface. Farther out in the sound, a pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins swam by.

A hundred yards off our bow, a geyser spouted and the back of a humpback rolled slowly under before unfurling an enormous, dripping tail. We pulled our paddles out of the water and went silent. With any luck it would surface again nearby.

Humpbacks, Scott whispered, typically stay under for four to five minutes. I checked my watch: A minute passed, then two, then three. Bubbles floated to the surface. After four minutes it began to occur to me that the whale could easily and unwittingly surface directly beneath our stealthy kayaks. But there was no point in moving: The whale could pop up anywhere. Five minutes passed, then six. Maybe the humpback had moved on.

Then, with a suddenness that made us gasp out loud, it burst to the surface 30 feet from a kayak paddled by Anne Myong, a Silicon Valley marketing manager.

It blew a big spout into the air -- a cloud of mist colored by the whale's own oil -- before arching its barnacle-covered back and sliding under the water. And then, a moment later, the black tail opened like a huge Japanese fan. Half an hour later, Anne said, her heart was still pounding.

Two days later, we were droning up Frederick Sound in the float plane, flying just beneath the low cloud ceiling, 200 feet off the water. As we neared the mouth of LeConte Glacier Bay, tiny icebergs began to appear in the channel, then bergs large enough to sink a luxury liner -- not to mention a float plane. We banked and circled sharply. The water beneath us was now peppered with icebergs. "Where the hell is he going to put this thing down?" I shouted from the back seat to no one in particular. Finally, after circling a couple more times, the pilot spotted an ice-free corridor and bounced us to a watery landing.

Camp was nearly identical to the one at Big Creek. Before we settled in, though, Scott had a chore for us. We paddled out into the bay and spent an hour rounding up floating chunks of ice, from fist- to bowling ball-sized. These tiny icebergs, remnants of bergs the size of strip malls, had broken off the face of LeConte Glacier and floated out to the mouth of the bay. Geologists believe this glacial ice was formed up on the Stikine Ice Cap 800 years ago and spent the intervening years creeping down through the mountains before returning to the sea. As we lifted the berglets out of the water, they fizzed and popped, releasing tiny pockets of air trapped around the time of the Third Crusade. It would be a while before we learned why we were gathering the ice.

At 3:45 a.m. the next morning I awoke to the crackle-boom of thunder, a racket that continued until dawn.

"That was some storm last night," I said to Scott as I unzipped my tent.

He just smiled and nodded toward the mudflats. Overnight they had been transformed into an ice-sculpture garden. Icebergs -- some looking uncannily like the carved ice swans you see at wedding buffets, others the size of small apartment buildings -- had drifted out of the fjord and been grounded here by the outgoing tide. As I watched, one the size of a garage tottered over and broke in half, with the now-familiar crackle-boom. It wasn't a thunderstorm, I finally realized, that had kept me awake.

I wasn't the first to make this mistake. John Muir, who camped here only 13 years after Alaska had been bought from the Russians, wrote that the local Stikine Indians called the fjord Hutli, or Thunder Bay, "from the sound made by the bergs in falling and rising from the front of the inflowing glacier."

It was good we were up early. We had a long day of paddling to reach the spot where the snout of LeConte Glacier tumbles into the sea. It's the southernmost glacier in the world to do so.

It was a round trip of well over 17 miles -- an exceedingly long distance for neophytes to paddle -- but we had a crucial ally: the tides. Millions of gallons of sea water would be pouring into the fjord behind us, raising the water level an inch and half every minute for six hours. And then, when it was time to turn around and head home, the water would drain back out, carrying icebergs and kayaks along with it.

LeConte Glacier Bay is a narrow, Yosemite-like canyon of sheer walls dripping with wispy ribbon waterfalls -- "bold granite headlands with their feet in the channel," as Muir described it.

Half an hour out of camp, we encountered pack ice of what looked to be Shackletonian thickness, bunched together by the incoming tide. Just when it looked like our little adventure was finished almost before it began, we discovered a channel barely wide enough for us to scoot through.

We heard a droning and turned around to see a six-passenger sightseeing skiff approaching from Petersburg. It reached the pack ice, searched in vain for an opening and headed home. We'd have the fjord entirely to ourselves.

Seals seemed to be everywhere, poking their heads out of the water to watch us with big, curious, sad eyes. Entire families lounged on flat-topped icebergs. Other bergs were the domain of bald eagles.

A little to our surprise, we were never cold -- as long as we kept paddling.

Both the water and air temperatures were about half a degree above freezing, but sealed into the kayaks like modern, tech-savvy Eskimos, we generated enough heat to stay chill-free, if not exactly toasty.

Three hours after leaving camp, we rounded a point and felt the icy breath of the glacier before we could see it. We paddled closer. Then the clouds parted and the LeConte Glacier appeared before us as if emerging from the mists of creation. Big and eerily blue, it tumbled out of the mountains in a violent, chaotic jumble. Blocks of ice the size of office buildings teetered at the edge of the 200-foot-high face, ready to topple lemming-like into the sea.

We hung back a safe distance, munching on granola bars and soaking up the scene. There was no chance of an eight-story-high cruise ship blocking our view this time.

A chill started to creep in. The tide began to turn, and that was our cue to spin the bows of our kayaks around and catch our ride home. It would be late afternoon before we paddled back to camp, but there was a victory celebration of sorts awaiting us: bottles of 2-year-old Chardonnay chilled on 800-year-old ice.