The Harding Icefields

The coolest jet flight i went on was crossing Greenland on a sunny day. Because my flight out of Poland had been delayed two hours, our pilot got permission to fly an unusually northerly route, taking advantage of a westward current of air that made up for all our lost time during the flight to Seattle. From my window seat i was super excited as the east coast of Greenland glided in to view. Huge mountains rose abruptly out of the ocean, and continued inland with glaciers pouring out between every one of them. As we got farther inland from the coast, the mountains were getting smaller, exactly the opposite of what normally happens. That just didn't make any sense. Then i realized suddenly that the mountains weren't getting smaller at all. Instead, the ice was getting thicker! Eventually it was so thick that only the very tips of the high mountain peaks were sticking out, and then even those were drowned by the ice.

Exit Glacier becomes visible as you get above treeline. You then spend the next couple of hours hiking up along it's side.

Some clouds moved in but i kept an eye on what was going on, until i saw some weird features in the clouds. Strange dark lines here and there. I was being fooled again. They were massive crevasses in patches of exposed ice. Even in knowing, it was hard to believe what i was seeing. There was nothing but a flat plain of snow and ice as far as i could see in any direction. From 40,000 feet high you can see hundreds of miles, and i couldn't see anything at all except white. After a considerable time we arrived on the west coast, which turned out to be more interesting than even the east coast was. It was more complex and as the glaciers poured into the ocean they split up into thousands of massive icebergs. We then traversed some of those other mysterious islands you always see on the globe between Canada and Greenland. They were all extremely interesting; i remember one that looked like it was made up of a matrix of southwest style mesas with large canyons forming a rectangular grid between them.

 

The top of Exit Glacier. The mountaintops across the ice are 4 miles away.

Years later i moved to Alaska, where you can get a little taste of Greenland. Only 55 miles from Anchorage lie the Harding Icefields. A vast sea of ice 20 miles wide and 50 miles long, it is the largest expanse of ice entirely within the United States and is roughly the size of the San Francisco Bay Area. With it's dozens of glaciers the icefields cover an area of 1,100 square miles, with ice that can be more than 1,000 feet thick. 250 miles to the east, straddling the US Canadian border, is something much larger, but that's another story.

Above the range of almost all plant life is a mile long region of badlands which were until very recently underneath the icefields. Now they are being quickly transformed by liquid water as shown, for example, by these steep 10 foot stream banks.

The icefields lie mostly within Kenai Fjords National Park. There is one short road that goes into the park. It ends at Exit Glacier, and from there is a very strenuous trail that that goes up to the icefields. Nine miles round trip, it rises relentlessly, gaining 1,000 feet of elevation every mile.

This rock surface shows both glacial polishing and scarring. It had been polished into a smooth undulating pattern over the eons, with more recent scarring visible moving from the upper left to the lower right as the ice dragged harder rocks across it's surface. 

After a long time stone surfaces are reduced to rubble by the ice, like the one pictured here.

The view at the top, which does a good job of hiding itself until the last 1/2 mile, is jaw dropping, a vast landscape of ice as far as the eye can see. It really does give off the impression that you have walked into Greenland or Antarctica. Here and there the tops of mountains poke up through their tomb of ice. They are commonly called Nunateks, the Eskimo word for "lonely mountain". You can go out to those mountains and climb them, if you have the skills. It is popular with mountaineers to traverse the icefields in spring, which can take up to two weeks depending on weather. 

The main view of the icefields. By the time you see this view you want to go much farther, but it takes a ton of energy just to get to this point. The most distant mountains visible in the center of the picture are 20 miles away!

It's a very rugged place but offers tons of possibility. Too bad it's so hard to get up there. If you really wanted to do some exploring you'd need to be in much better shape than i was and start early in the morning, or camp and explore the next day. While the sun is up you are constantly battered by an eternal, strong cold wind. The ice refrigerates miles of air that drifts across the surface. That air condenses and then slides downward over the glaciers that pour down to the sea, picking up speed as it gets constricted in outlets like Exit Glacier.

A full size crop of the center of the previous picture. The forward edge of the field can be seen in the far lower right corner. From there to the distant nunateks is 20 miles. The icefields continue another 25 to 30 miles beyond that.

A year earlier i had taken this picture with a little snapshot camera while i was flying myself back from Homer. I didn't know exactly what i was looking at at the time. It turns out the group of peaks in the center of this photo are part of those in the above photos that reside in the middle of the length of the icefields. This picture is taken looking east, so the right side of the photo is part of the southerly icefields, not visible from the trail viewpoint.

When i was in the area i saw a group of mountaineers skiing out onto the ice. I watched them for a whie, until they became so small that they completely disappeared into the landscape. Until then i had never seen anyone just disappear from right in front of my eyes. What blew my mind was that they weren't very far off by the time they became too small to see.

Mountian goats graze at ease knowing no human can get uphill fast enough to be a threat. I gathered some of their fur and later gave it to a small child in New York, claiming it was from the infamous Yeti.