Day 27: Exit Glacier

I woke up this morning to the smell of smoke which is fairly comforting, to be honest - I have some survival instincts still intact. The smoke, though, means that the wind was blowing the wildfire action this way and that the day was destined to be hazy.

We slow rolled it out this morning (I think I write that in every single blog post. I swear we sometimes get out before noon!); made a grocery list, reconciled our snack situation (snacks for days), and headed out towards the Exit Glacier!

Fun fact: we're staying in a neighborhood called Bear Creek just north of Seward, so we didn't actually make it into town properly til this evening. But that's later. This morning we went hiking in our latest National Park: Kenai Fjords!

Glacial Floodplains

Smoky views

Haze from the smoke doesn't make this any less beautiful!

Ice from the glacier that rolled down into the outwash plain

It was really magnificent. We were making our way to Exit Glacier, one of the most accessible glaciers in the country, and stopped along the way to check out the glacial floodplain (called an Outwash Plain). It was this wide open expanse of river braids stretched out for ages and ages, and since most of it is tumbled glacier rocks it's really easy to walk on. And because it's right next to this very accessible glacier, almost no one explores the plain, opting to spend all their time getting close to the glacier! Suckers; we did both.

Exit Glacier

Up close

Majestic

We were mostly excited to be so close to a glacier, but also kinda bummed: we had been told that you could TOUCH the thing. My chat with a park ranger in the visitor's center after returning from the trail makes me think that USUALLY you can, but the recent spate of extraordinarily hot weather here (record breaking heat through much of the state - into the mid-80s and Anchorage hit 90 this week, breaking the old record by 5 degrees) has made the ice a LOT more unstable. They had an avalanche off the Harding Icefield (which is the giant ice patch - essentially a Mega Glacier - that feeds Exit Glacier and several others in this mountain range) that made one of the Exit Glacier hiking trails impassable until today. So I think the park is trying to play it safe and keep people away so that they don't fall into crevasses and die. Reasonable. But Dad was bummed. So anyway, back to the story, we don't yet know that there's a practical reason for keeping us away. Dad is inclined towards paranoia, which I sometimes give into as well, so we're pretty sure it's just bureaucrats keeping us off the ice to kill our joy. So we decide we're gonna keep going PAST the trail end and see if we can't get up close and touch the darned thing.

Thank. God. that only lasted about 15 feet before we called it. I was sure Dad was going to ACTUALLY fall to his death and everyone was going to believe I pushed him since we've been making jokes about pushing him off a fjord in Alaska. And now we're IN Kenai Fjords National Park and he's gonna accidentally die when I happen to be the only one nearby? No thank you.

I was taking photos from a distance to have evidence I was no where nearby when he tumbled off the cliff face. 

He didn't fall, everyone survived.

But we did neglect to eat lunch. So when we left the park to head back and shower before mass, we were getting a little hangry. By the time mass was over, I was ABSOLUTELY hangry. When the three of us were grocery shopping for side dishes to go with dinner, M&D left me alone completely and we all made it out alive. When we got back and I was lighting the charcoal to heat up so we could cook our host-caught salmon filets for dinner and Dad thought that was a good time to give advice on how to heat up a charcoal grill, I was thinking longingly of those cliff faces.

We all liked each other again after eating. Helped along by the fresh-caught salmon from our hosts, plus the homemade beer they gave us. Plus the camp fire with s'mores fixins they had going, and the couple of hours spent shooting the shit around a fire. Plus hanging with their pups. All's well that ends well; I'm glad we didn't push him off a fjord.

Helpful charcoal advisor

Otto, giver of kisses

Brooks, lady sled dog extraordinaire