Glacier Hiking!

On our way from Valdez back to Anchorage, to return the RV, we got to see some more beautiful vistas -

this was an enormously wide valley

…colorful hills…

…vista…

…and the glacier we were to be hiking.

The Matanuska Glacier is 27 miles long, 4 miles wide and the largest road-accessible glacier in Alaska. I thought it’d be a unique experience to hike on a glacier, so I signed us up.

It doesn’t look like much with the mountains looming over it in the distance, but I’ll have a picture later with us in front for scale.

Our guide carried lots of stuff in his backpack - ropes, carabiners, ice drills, reflective thermal blanket (in case we fell in ice water), emergency medical kit, etc., so we felt very safe.

That’s actually glacier that he’s on. It looks like a bunch of dirt because it is. That’s all the rocks and dirt that the glacier scraped away years and miles ago, that gets deposited at its terminal end. As we hiked on, it became prettier -

We were able to fill a water bottle with pure glacial water (it was surprisingly very “flat” tasting) -

He knew that that trickle of water on the right side of the picture arose from deep in the glacier, and had drunk from it frequently before without any issues (and we didn’t develop any issues later, either).

people for scale

We had a beautifully clear day for our hike -

…and this created lots of streams on the surface that ran into “moulins”, or vertical shafts in the ice:

Crevasses were gorgeous and scary at the same time.

My crampons:

really serious spikes

We got to learn and use specific skills for maneuvering around on icy terrain. This rope was for us to clip on to, as well as hold on, when there’s an open drop off to one side -

…that allowed us to reach this crevice:

… (and play “Where’s Steve?”) deep in the glacier.

Then we got to “walk” down this ice wall:

sorry you have to look at Steve’s butt for this, but I couldn’t take any pictures of myself descending -

I just loved the clear bright colors -

As we came back down the glacier, we stopped at the ice falls (this is a side perspective)…

…(in comparison to the straight on) for a last photo -

So where we went was up on top on the left:

I’ll close with this reflection photo…just because.