Up to Exit

After getting just a taste of Exit Glacier from yesterday’s short hike, we vowed to do the much longer Harding Icefield trail. This  trail basically parallels the glacier up to its source in the Harding Icefield, through forest, then meadow, then up steep switchbacks to subalpine meadow, then alpine, then to the edge of the miles-wide icefield itself. The National Park Service recommends “at least 6-8 hours”.

Naturally, we didn’t get started until almost noon :-/.

There’s an interesting aspect to the two-lane highway drive up to the Exit Glacier entrance of the park: signs by the side of the road with numbers on them – years, as it turns out. We finally read, or figured out, that each sign marks where the terminus of the glacier was for that year. In the late 1800’s it was so far down we still had a good 15-minute drive at 50 MPH to get to the entrance. it shows how much Exit Glacier has receded over the last century. It also shows how young the land is in this valley; nothing’s been growing there for more than 100 years because it’s been buried under countless tons of ice. And much of it is much, much younger.

As usual, Connor was strongly against going on the hike. As usual, Sharon prevailed on him to go with us for a little while before heading back to the RV for his real goal of the trip: watching the entire first season of “24” before we left for home.

It was buggy down in the forests, as usual. Not too bad if we kept moving, but god forbid you should have to stop and tie a shoelace. I counted five seconds before I had lots of flies at me. (Yes, I had on 100% DEET bug spray. They didn’t actually bite, mostly, but what an annoyance!) This is about where Connor abandoned.

We also heard about a fair amount of bear spottings on this trail, but they were all in the morning and traffic was pretty high – sitting still you’d see someone about every 5 to 10 minutes – so I wasn’t too worried about it. Soon we were up higher into light brush and meadow, with lots of subalpine flowers.

We decided, reluctantly, to cut the hike short to rejoin the kid so we wouldn’t spend the entire afternoon alone in the RV. (Not that he’d care.) Sharon turned around, and I headed up a bit farther to see if I could get some good photos of the icefield. I wasn’t able to reach the icefield unfortunately, but got to the top of the cliff we were switchbacking, and there was a magnificent view of Exit with the icefield at the top. It was just breathtaking (literally, with the katabatic wind you can hear in the video).

And there were a couple of leaders for a Backroads tour that went up to the icefield, running “sweep” to make sure all their clients got down. Late 20’s, perhaps? Kind of bored with it already. They got our their camera, so I offered to take a photo of the two of them. They declined and said their camera had a special setting for the arm’s length shot. Which they did, and then remarked on how it looked just like all their other arm’s length shots. I literally said, “GIVE me the damn thing!” and proceeded to take a decent photo for them. They headed down then, one ear in their ipods in this magnificent silence, nattering about the people they worked with the whole time. I certainly didn’t have to worry about the bears.

While up there, I shot some video with my little Canon:

…and scrambled back down in about 45 minutes, “Excuse me, excuse me…” so we could get to the beautiful Seward Sea Life Center before they closed. In total, we got about 2/3 of the distance and 75% of the elevation in four hours up and down.

I fell asleep waiting outside the Sea Life Center gift shop.

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My trip photo album will be posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/sean.deuby; I’ll put my very best photos also on http://flickr.com/photos/shorinsean.

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