Interlude with glaciers
posted in Alaska, OmegaGranny |More sunny days…we think GrannyJ brought them with her, which, of course, means she will take them away when she leaves.
Yesterday, we took advantage of the hint of sunlight we saw, and headed off to The Glacier. We were rewarded with the kinds of views that show up on Alaska tourism magazines.
Mountain and river:
Dad and dotter sharing some laughter and nose-rubs alongside a lake:
The lake and mountains looking very picturesque:
GrannyJ in front of The Glacier:
The glacier is advancing at the rate of a foot a day. At the same time, it used to be where GrannyJ is pictured, and has actually retreated to where it is in the view (half a mile back?). So the end result: if it weren’t advancing as quickly as it is, it would have receded quite a bit further.
In reality, what GrannyJ is standing on is frozen icy debris. It’s astonishing how much grit and dirt and rock this honkin’ heap o’ ice has left behind. Anyway, you drive to almost this point, then hike the half mile to the real glacial stuff. The keepers of the private property on which the glacier ends claimed that we could drive GrannyJ to the foot of the glacier…ahem. They wuz wrong. Or maybe they didn’t quite understand when we asked how close she could get to it. Technically, yes, she’s “on” the glacier. But what we wanted was something like this:
The ice is incredibly blue. The dotter was poking at one of the numerous rivulets of water rushing across the surface of the ice, and you get an idea of the blue-ness:
The dotter had to try sliding down the ice:
We followed the trail to the lake at the real foot of the glacier:
You can’t tell just how big this is, but I have another picture of the same shot, just a little angled to the left, which has a trio of people crossing the ice midway down, and the people are little ant-like spots on the ice.
At this point, we should have turned around and taken the trail back. But, hey, we’re wild and crazy and adventuresome. We wanted to go a different way “out”, so we followed the stream back out from the bottom of the lake. We had to cross numerous times, one of which ended up with OmegaDad nearly being swept into the water when the “solid ice” in the middle of the four-foot-wide rushing icy stream turned out to not be solid and sank beneath him. This so freaked out the dotter that at bedtime, when we were doing the Feeling Game, her “I was scared by…” was this, and it led to a discussion of what would happen if he had been drowned, and what would happen if we both were drowned, and “how would I get home?”
There were some grand carved canyons in the ice:
But after a great deal of slipping and sliding and schlepping through icy rivulets and slurgy muck, we made it out.
We drove further up into the mountains, above the tree line, and got a grand postcard-like vista:
We ate dinner at a roadhouse which had this lovely little jewel of a tundra lake behind it:
And then we drove home.
All told, about 10 or 11 hours out-and-about. I have to say that by the time we were about 20 miles from home, I was ready to kill my dotter. This child cannot stop chattering. It was endless. I was at the point where I was desperate for peace and quiet!
But there you have it: Yes, there is sunshine in Alaska. Yes, there are glaciers and forests and mountains and lakes and rivers in Alaska. I am mentally storing up all the sunny days in my memory, so that if it keeps raining, I’ve got that sunny memory to keep me going.
