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.

Needless Trailblazing

This scenario has happened way too many times to me. I find an inspiring mountain or mesa or whatever. I can find no trail on maps to get up it (or maybe i don't have a map available and am just guessing from driving on available roads in the area). I exhaust a lot of energy while i "bushwhack"/ scramble/ climb up the side of it. Once on top i find a nice trail i could have taken, along with some benches or sunbathers, and i feel like an idiot. People are certainly looking at me like i'm an idiot, or some kind of super extremist that purposefully makes things as hard as possible.

The most extreme case of this was on one of San Juan Islands North of Seattle. There was one high peak on this island and i tried driving around it but couldn't find any sign of a road before i called it a lost cause and decided to just go for it. I spent two hours climbing up rocky cliffs that were only a little less steep than the ones right next to where i started. Those had actual rock climbers on ropes. There were a few hairy spots but i eventually made it up. Just as i got to the top , very sweaty and exhausted, i encountered a wooden fence in front of a paved parking lot full of old people, some of whom were taking pictures of me climbing over the lip of these ledges. Great. It turned out the road to the top was just another 50 yards past the point where i turned around. At least i was correct in thinking it was the best place around to get a nice view of the island and Mt. Baker.

This past Summer i did it again when i decided to climb the Lionshead here in Alaska. I'd driven by it a dozen times and finally decided i had to see the view on top. There is no official trail, and the approach to the base forces you to kind of walk through a grey area of trespassing past some telecommunications buildings. Since there were no trails listed on any maps i decided to take a direct approach. I walked along a gravel road to it's terminus and then went straight up the side of the mountain. The vegetation was as thick as it had looked from a distance, and the mountainside itself was steeper than i had imagined. It was a hot day and it's hard to immediately engage in strenuous activity after an hours long drive. Fortunately it's not a long hike, only about 800 feet high on the climbable side.


Almost halfway up the side, in a rare clearing

I got to the top. The views were just as i had expected, and of course, there was a nice trail up there. I didn't follow it back because it went down towards some very vertical cliffs, but in the Fall i returned, and after a little investigation found the trail on the bottom, near the opposite end from where i started. The trail is a much, much nicer way to go. It's ridiculous how much better.


On one side the mountain drops straight down from overhanging cliffs. This side is far higher above the ground than the road side

Also on top was a strange partially mummified skeleton of a baby goat or sheep. It was completely intact, but obviously scavenged. I wondered how it died. It seems like a strange place for a goat/sheep to give birth because of a lack of shelter up there and only berries to eat (which wouldn't be around in spring). Plus, the mountain is well separated from other peaks, so i wonder if the baby was taken by an eagle. The corpse was small enough for an eagle to have lifted and dropped up there in the open near the edge of a massive cliff, a perfect dining area for a bird to be undisturbed. I would imagine any larger predator would have eaten the bones.



On the way down that day it was getting late. The trees are so thick you can't get a bearing, and i walked off down the wrong side of the mountain. The whole thing is connected to the gravel road i walked on by a kind of a saddle of land which drops off on both sides, and i went down too far on one side, so i had to walk back uphill some more to get back on track. I found a path that made it easier to walk through the woods. Unfortunately it was a bear trail. You could tell it was a bear trail because of the endless procession of bear scat that i kept having to step over. It starting to bother me because the scat appeared to be getting fresher as i walked further along the trail. Fisher was acting nervous too, so i started calling out to the bears and breaking lots of dead trees as we walked along. Line of site was very limited. That's another reason the actual trail is so much better to take.





The Lionshead isn't actually a mountain, because it was glacially created. Glaciers don't make mountains, although they make mountains look more impressive after they're done with them. I'm relaying this info based on a roadside sign i read last summer, so the details are not sharp in my mind. The rock formation exists because of old subsurface volcanic activity. An upwelling of magma changed the rock into a somewhat rare and very hard form of quartz related rock. As the valley was carved out the ice couldn't grind away the rock because it was harder than any of the other rocks around. When the ice receded it left this massive tower of rock in the middle of the valley. These days it's in pretty bad shape because the ice is taking a different approach. The ground on the top is divided into parallel fissures which are being driven apart by freeze thaw cycles. The whole thing is crumbling apart, it fared better when it was permanently encased in ice.

Matanuska Glacier

While my brother was here we decided to go to Valdez, based on weather forecasts. Supposedly it was going to be nice there as compared to where we were. On the way we stopped at the Matanuska Glacier. I hadn't been there in a couple of years, and it seems like every time i go there the property owners are charging more to get through their gate. John had never been on a Glacier before, i don't think. He'd certainly never worn crampons or used an ice axe, and that takes an adjustment period.



Bordering one side of the glacier is a mountain called "The Lionshead". It is a pillar of very hard rock that the ice could not carve away. The name "Lionshead" was always confusing to me since most people agree that from the road the mountain looks more like a sphinx than a lions head. John noticed that the view from the other side, on the ice, has a sheer rock wall with vegetation on it in a pattern that does seem to resemble a lions head, as pictured below. So i wonder if this is the side it was originally named it after.



The glacier has a lake on it that is not too far to walk too. It's kind of hidden and it's interesting to see how everything changes from one summer to the next. The lake on this glacier has always annoyed me because the water is always very muddy looking, as opposed to the pristine clear blue water you normally think of when imagining a lake on a glacier. In this pic you can see some people walking across an ice ledge on the far side of the lake.