The reason that we drove three hours on a gravel road yesterday is to get to a very special destination today. We showed pictures of the mountains surrounding our campsite last night. Well, spilling out of those mountains are many glaciers. We're going to hike to one today!
Normally, shuttles show up every half hour at the end of the McCarthy pedestrian bridge to take visitors the first five miles towards the glacier. But that service hasn't started yet. We have absolutely no cell phone signal, but we were told an old land line at the end of the bridge could be used to call the shuttle. Oops! No service here either.
So we took off walking across the pedestrian bridge towards the town of McCarthy, 0.6 miles away.
It's a good omen for the day when a beautiful little bird greets you on the bridge and poses for pictures.
We should note that besides no cell phone service, there is also no indoor plumbing at our campground. But we found the cleanest and nicest vault toilet on the hike to McCarthy. It's high on our unique list of the "outhouses in the most beautiful locations."
It was a short walk into the interesting little town of McCarthy. Most of the businesses haven't opened for the season yet, but we're sure this is a bustling little community in the middle of the summer. We did find the general store where we could arrange for a shuttle to the next town down the road--Kennecott, Alaska. We had been told that it would be $5 to take the shuttle, but today they charged $10 one-way, or $15 per person for a round trip.
The good news is they could take us immediately. On the slow five-mile ride, we visited with Vladimar from Russia, Walter from Arkansas, and Diane from Washington. All of these temporary McCarthy residents arrived last week and are working through Labor Day. The general store, lodge, shuttle, and cafe in McCarthy hire 35 people each summer, and these guys were learning the ropes while the tourists were starting to trickle in.
The town of Kennecott is easy to recognize, because most of its buildings are painted red. This is a national historic landmark, and houses the history of the prosperous copper mine that built this isolated town in the mountains.
They mined copper here from the early 1900s until 1938. Then the company suddenly decided to cease operations and sent all its employees packing. Kennecott became a ghost town, that is being restored since it became a national historic site and part of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
Again, we are early in the season, and the national visitor center isn't open yet. But visitors are allowed to walk the streets and admire the 76 buildings that make up this old mining town.
At the end of town is the beginning of the Root Glacier trail, and that is our real destination today.
It's an easy trail with very little elevation gain. On the way, we even had waterfall views to admire. You can see Mark in his blue jacket in the center of the picture below, hiking along the trail above the falls.
But he is easier to spot when we dropped in closer to the water.
We walked beside the glacier for much of the two-mile hike, but you might not recognize it. We expected all glaciers to be white. But we are finding that much of the glaciers in the world are sheets of ice covered with dirt and rocks so they are brown. That brown undulating surface behind Mark is called a glacier moraine.
As we got closer to the top of the glacier, we could see where the rock-covered brown glacier turned white.
It took a surprisingly long walk through the curving rock path to get to the white ice toe of the Root Glacier this morning.
Then it was a steep--and a little slippery--hike up the ice to actually get on Root Glacier.
Now we're up on the white ice, enjoying the views and getting to appreciate the size of this glacier.
In each of the pictures below, you'll have to look to find Mark or Denisa on the vast white glacier.
We have been enjoying the blue skies all morning, and we were very excited to find the blue glacier water as well!
As we progressed up the face of the glacier, the blue ponds got bigger.
We've seen videos of people doing polar bear plunges and swimming in these glacier lakes. That really didn't interest us, especially when we could see that the water was so cold it was forming ice crystals on the surface.
We had a less-chilly way to experience this glacier water first-hand.
We had packed licorice sticks in our suitcase, just for the purpose of using it as straws to sample the glacier water. Clear water rivers can be found all over the glacier, so we spotted a particularly clean one and laid down for a sip.
That's when we found out that our smashed licorice had lost its continuous hole in the inside. We had to cut it down to a pretty small piece before we got a straw opening that would allow us a sip.
Licorice-sipping challenge completed!
We've been enjoying Root Glacier and the surrounding mountains for over an hour by now. What a blessed day we are experiencing!
As we climbed over another ice hill, we could finally get a glimpse of the top of the glacier. It was very far away!
All this time, we have been navigating the ice wearing our hiking boots. But we had purchased ice cleats for our Alaska trip, and by-golly we were going to use them. So we took a few moments to attach them to the bottom of our boots.
We were glad to have them. While we had gone up-hill fine without them, they certainly helped when we headed back down the incline. We knew that tour companies in Kennecott will rent crampons for a daily fee, but we were glad to have our own for this adventure.
We also know that tour companies will take hikers on a guided tour of Root Glacier for a mere $98 per person. They include crampons, but we couldn't see any reason that one would need a guide to find and enjoy this glacier.
With ice cleats, we could tackle bigger inclines, and we got some of our favorite pictures of the day. This one includes Mark on a tall ice bridge overlooking another one of those blue ponds.
Mark snapped this panorama picture as Denisa wandered more of God's wonders today!
We love the big grandeur of the glacier, but the tiny details are fun too. Denisa loved how the ice could preserve a tiny leaf imbedded in it.
Tiny stones heat up from the sun, and sink into the ice as the temperature of the rock rises.
While most of the surface of the glacier was quite smooth, we sometimes found these crunchy pitted areas that made for interesting walking.
Blue rivers wind all over the face of the glacier. We hopped over the little ones, and had to retrace our steps when we got trapped by the big ones.
Besides the rock-covered ice at the toe of the glacier, there are also rock covered moraines running the length of the glacier. We removed our ice cleats and hiked up onto one of these medial moraines to try it out.
Sometimes the rock covering was only an inch thick, and in other places it was a foot thick.
Even in this icy environment, patches of peat-moss-like plants were trying to anchor and grow to the rocks.
In the afternoon, we lost our blue skies and we decided it was time to head back towards camp. We had been on the glacier for almost three hours, and hiked for four miles on ice without seeing another person.
We were completely off the ice, when we thought we heard voices. We looked up to see two tiny figures in the distance.
Two people were taking a guided ice-climbing tour. One was just getting to the top of the ice cliff that we had just hiked by. We guess we weren't all alone on the glacier after all!
The hike back took us by the same waterfall . . .
and Denisa had to pause to take this picture of her first Alaskan lupine starting to unfurl into bloom.
Mark's Alltrails app took us onto an alternate trail that would make a loop through town. We hiked a steep hill only to find that the downhill portion of the loop was blocked off. So we got this upper view of the backside of the mining buildings, but it cost us an extra 1.6 miles of hiking. We've already hiked 8.4 miles today at this point.
We were planning to save our hiking legs for a trip out to Toe Lake. We asked our shuttle driver to drop us off closest to this lake. But since all the drivers are brand new to town and have never made the hike themselves, they were a little uncertain where that was. So we got in a few more extra steps before we finally arrived at Toe Lake at 4:45 p.m.
This is where Kennecott Glacier and its dirt-covered icy moraines end. Ice calves off the end of glacier and is floating on the lake. The surface of the water is still melting from its winter's solid sheet of ice. While watching the icebergs float in the lake, we finally took the time to eat the lunch we packed for today.
By the time we walked from Toe Lake, to the town of McCarthy and across the bridges to the van, we had added another 5.3 miles to our day's hike. That makes a total of over 14 miles today, and our legs are tired! We were glad to sit down in the van! It was then that we decided to start driving to get at least part of the gravel road drive out of the way this evening. Besides, the ice we bought on our first day for the ice chest is almost melted, and we need to buy more. That's when Mark though that we were seeing plenty ice today, why not use some of it to keep our food cool? So he broke off some ice chunks, and we headed further down the McCarthy Road.
We looked at several camping options along the way, and found another moose on the drive this evening.
But we eventually ended up making the 68-mile gravel road trip all at once. The Milepost mentioned a campsite option a little outside the town of Chitina on O'Brien Creek Road. We got mountain views, a bathroom, and it was free! Another great camp site for the ending of our Day 3 Best Glacier Hike Ever!
WoW! That about says it all. WOW!
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