Alaska 2022 – 16

This is Exit Glacier as seen from Herman Leirer Road, just outside of Seward.

Approaching Exit Glacier from the Kenai Fjords Visiter Center, you can see the trail in the right bottom corner of this photo. You can actually get to within feet of this glacier. I saw part of the cliff to the left of the glacier fall off at the “waterfall” barely visible at the left margin. It made a thunderous roar and scared the poo out of most of us. This trail was closed on our last visit here due to “bear activity”.

Cathy is heading up the trail to the viewpoint.

Looking across Resurrection Bay at the town of Seward, Mt. Marathon is directly behind the town. The 5K race here starts in downtown, goes to the top of the mountain and back into town. The race, held yearly on July 4th is by qualification only and is extremely dangerous, with runners sometimes jumping up to 30 feet at a time downhill. One runner never returned (grizzly food?).

This is the start of the trail up to the Harding Icefield. The ice-field is more than 50 miles long and thousands of feet thick. It is the main source of the glaciers for the Kenai Fjords National Park and feeds glaciers from Resurrection Bay to Halibut Cove on the Cook Inlet.

Believe it or not, it is easier to ascend this than to descend.

About halfway to the ice-field, this is the upper Exit Glacier flow.

Getting very near the ice-field, there are several “paths” you can take, depending on the current snowpack.

I took this path, crossing this 200′ snowfield.

It looked pretty safe until you saw this cave-in. You could get swept by the creek running below this snow bridge.

This is the ice-field. There is snow everywhere. The peaks sticking up through the ice are more than 5,000 feet high. This is MUCH more impressive when viewed in person. Photography does not do it justice.

This is an ice bridge that is probably about 30 foot deep. There was some interesting hiking going to the ice-field.

This is the emergency shelter at the ice-field. Notice the heavy cables securing it to the rock. If you get caught here in a ice storm or high winds, you can either wait here for rescue or the duration.

The end point of my climb contained this marker.

One last look at the ice-field before heading back to the warmth of the truck. I hiked down with an official from Ohio State. Needless to say, we talked football all the way down.

We thought of an “easier” way to see the ice-fields. We were told that we could make reservations only for the next day, which was supposed to be raining.

We took a walk into town (Moose Pass) to contemplate. The growing season may be short but it sure is vibrant.

With Cathy doing the negations, we got a flight the same day, and at half price! The easy way.

After taking off in the float plane, the views immediately became spectacular.

The view of the ice-field from 1,000 feet up was amazing.

We flew up the ice-field to Bear Glacier. The pools of water on the glacier were an incredible blue.

This is the Bear Glacier as it enters Resurrection Bay. The black streaks are talus from the joining of two or more glaciers and are a result of the grinding of the rock along the edges of the ice flow. The Bear Glacier is clearly formed by three upstream ice-fields.

There are a lot of small and large icebergs in this photo. We could actually see seals on some of them.

We then turned towards Seward and headed back to Moose Pass.

The bay was an incredible blue.

The floatplane is close quarters. No, the pilot did not ask for any help.

We took one last look back at the terminus of the Bear Glacier.

The view of Mt. Marathon from a little higher up was spectacular.

The small lakes in the tundra are the remnants of grounded icebergs that melted in place over the years.

We went all the way to the Harding Icefield and are not even tired, the easy way.

You can see hundreds of salmon in the water in the creek leading into Tern Lake, at the junction of the Sterling and Seward highways.

Tern Lake is one of my favorite spots.

We ended the day with a view from the road on the way back to Seward.