Pictures of Picture Takers

During the summer of 2010 I had three sets of summer visitors back to back. Unfortunately the weather was far from ideal during much of that time. Below are pictures of some of the things we did.

My friend Jeff came up first and was here in Alaska for Summer Solstice, the best day of the year. The weather was pretty bad most of the time Jeff was here (I think it was the first time ever that it rained here on the solstice), but that was ok, because he used to live here, so he wasn't seeing things for the first time, and we were inebriated most of the time anyway.

 I took Jeff up to Black Lake. A pretty nice hike for a 12 minute drive from home.

From there we headed down to Williwaw Lakes, and took the looonnggg way around the front of O'Malley back to Glen Alps. That trail, by the way, is a stunning example of poor trail design.

 After a lucky break of fantastic weather in Seward, i took Jeff to Exit Glacier, on the edge of Kenai Fjords National Park. In this picture all the forest in the foreground is brand new, advancing towards us as the glacier retreats behind us.

The short excursion to Exit Glacier offered me a very fun new thing to try out. I've been to Exit several times, it's one of the only things most people get to see in the park, and it's a very easy, paved walk up to the glacier. Along the way is a spur trail, that takes you along a very strenuous hike up to the ice fields. You can read my post on the Harding Ice Fields for more information.

At Exit glacier are a million signs warning you not to go any farther. These signs are around for good reason. On the other hand, it always irritates me because Exit Glacier has divided, at the bottom, into two toes. Each toe currently occupies a rough rocky ravine. This has only developed in the last 10 years, as far as i know, you  used to be able to walk up to the toe at ground level, on the gravel benches by the river.

I noticed that at this time most of the river is coming from the far toe, invisible from the official trail. So i decided we should go and see what was over there. I wondered if there would be an ice cave. Through a bit of work we found a way to clamber over the bottom of the glacier and it's cliffs, and do a bit of tricky hopping around to avoid stepping in any water. What we found was worth the effort.

Here you can see the deep narrow gorge and the glacier high above in the distance. This gorge was present even when it and everything else in the picture was under ice, as recently as a decade ago.

The river we walked along emerged violently and suddenly from a roaring gorge. There was no way to enter the gorge, so we had to backtrack and climb up the backside of the cliffs. That in itself was a little sketchy, and as Jeff pointed out quite accurately, it was similar to caving, but without a roof over our heads.  From our perch on the cliff we could see up the gorge to the glacier, still a ways off. We tried to push on but the terrain was too dangerous and seemed to get worse as we went on. I was satisfied.

Lying on my belly, i was able to edge over the side of the sloping cliff for this wide angle straight down view of a violent waterfall in the gorge. It was very loud here.

Jimmy at Portage Glacier.

The day after Jeff left Jimmy arrived. Jimmy was only here for 4 days, so we were pretty busy trying to make the best of it. Except for the first day, Jimmy ended up being pretty lucky with the weather. I was able to get us out away from the clouds into nice areas.

 I have a book showing everthing from here to those cliffs on the right, all under about 200 feet of ice in the 1980's.

 A beautiful day above Whittier. One of those times when it was cloudy in Anchorage all day.
 

 Jimmy at the Matanuska Glacier. His first time on a glacier, first time in crampons, first time with an ice axe.

Some really cool seracs. At least this post has pictures with people for scale.

Every time i go toe the Matanuska Glacier it looks totally different. The last time i visited i was sure the lake at the glacier was almost gone. This time it was bigger than i've ever seen it.

 

 This was as far as we got before we had to turn around due to time limits. Jimmy did not want to turn back.

After Jimmy left my sister, who has never visited me, and her boyfriend Danielle (whom i had never met) came up at the beginning of August. Danielle is an Italian working and going to school in the United States. Neither of them had been anywhere close to Alaska. I can't even remember how long they were here, and i think they got the worst of the weather. Still, we were able to do things and had some good sun now and then.

Mary Beth and Danielle at Gold Cord Lake.

 Fisher came along, got wet, and started shedding in the heat, the room temperature heat.

Fisher got so hot he had to seek solace in the inadequate shade of fireweed.

 Fisher on the way back to the mine. Looks like Fisher is hijacking this blog, so i'm calling it quits for now.

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.

Halibut Fishing

We were given the opportunity to go on a halibut fishing charter, and jumped at the chance. It was out of Seward, which is a two hour drive, and it left at 7am in the morning, so we opted to camp the night before just outside of town. We camped in the rain, and i was worried the weather would be no better the next day. I wasn't interested in fishing off the side of a boat in driving wind and rain. The next morning things seemed the same. Although i thought i'd gotten a terrible night of sleep, both of us turned out to be in far better shape than many of the other passengers, who had spent the entire night drinking at a party. With the tossing boat, some of them were truly suffering. Lucky for me we had two hours of sitting on the boat drinking coffee to wake up, so i was ready to go by the time we arrived at the fishing grounds.


The lands of Kenai Fjords



It didn't take long to catch a fish. I was probably trying for around 20 minutes before i hooked my first fish, after numerous false leads that were the result of lines getting tangled in the current. The fish took nearly ten minutes to reel in. We had a limit of two halibut each after which we would still be able to fish for our limit of salmon.


Maree tries her luck....

The crew was very nice and patient while spending large amounts of their time untangling everyones' lines. Soon after Maree caught her first halibut the captain decided to move the boat because we were apparently drifting off the fish. It was then that we had a problem. Something was wrong with the motor that reeled in the anchor. Eventually it was decided that it was broken and we were going to have to pull the anchor up ourselves. It didn't sound like that would be a problem until i was told that the anchor was 450 feet down on the seafloor, and it was a very heavy anchor. It took two teams of 4 of us around 15 minutes to pull that anchor up out of the water. It was a very heavy anchor. It was so heavy, in fact, that we all decided we had absolutely no interest in hauling the anchor up again, so we opted not to continue halibut fishing, and instead to go and look for salmon.


Someone said there was a bear on shore, but i could never see it.

I didn't have any luck with the salmon but it was a nice time anyway. The boat was much closer to shore for the salmon, and the shore happened to be Kenai Fjords National Park, so not catching fish was still as nice as a sightseeing boat tour. We had a lot of salmon already, it seemed like people just kept giving it to us at home because everyone had too much.





It wasn't long before all those party goers started losing consciousness, heading below deck to a bed or passing out at a table, or outside where they stood, so as afternoon approached the captain decided to take us back in. The crew spent that time chopping up all our fish. They were very good at it, and even though we didn't catch our limit, the two of us still ended up with around a years worth of halibut to eat.


Notice the passed out guy on the deck in the background.



Fishing charters may seem expensive, but halibut are such large fish that, when compared to market prices, i think you come out on top. Think about it, if the charter is $300 and you catch 60 pounds of halibut then, even if you are in a place where halibut is cheap, you'll still have caught more than your money's worth. Also, halibut can get up to 400 pounds.