McKinley Flight Part 2 - Glacier Landing

After cruising the mountains and valleys for a while we landed on a fork of the Ruth Glacier known as Mountain Home. Here we are on final approach.

Despite all the snow it was pretty warm.

This place is known as Mountain Home for a house built by the late Don Sheldon, a bush pilot who pioneered glacier landings in support of climbers. The house can be rented from the park service for a reasonable $75 per night.

Skiers will rent it and take to the local slopes. The slopes aren't crowded and plenty of natural snow but the lifts are non-existent.

Mountain Home International Airport - While we were there two other planes landed. It is getting crowded. Time for departure.

For the first part of the trip back to Talkeetna we followed the Kahiltna Glacier. It is 1 to 2 miles wide, 35 miles long and about a mile thick. It travels about 1 foot per day so it takes about 100 years for an ice crystal in a snowflake that lands on the upper end to come out on the lower end. The heavy weight of the thousands of feet of ice compact the crystals to form dense blue ice. It looks blue because the crystals tend to absorb light from the red end of the spectrum. (Here I go sounding like a physics teacher)

At the upper end the top of the glacier is covered with new white snow that hardly melts during the summer because of the high altitude. As the glacier bends around corners, cravasses are formed that can be 200 feet deep. Sometimes snow bridges will form and the surface will look nice and smooth. (Remember I said that 37 climbers had been lost)

The glacier will pick up bits of sand and rock (called flour) that will be exposed at lower altitudes in warm weather.

In the summer pools and rivers will form on the top of the glacier exposing the blue ice below. For all these pictures we were at least a mile above the glacier so things may be much bigger than they appear.Here a terrane (or wall) is exposed due to excessive melt cause by global warming. The terrane is 200 ft high indicating Kahiltna is 200 ft thinner than at some time in the past.

This is still a glacier but there is so much sand and rock that you can't see the ice except in the bottom of the lake.There are still several years of glacier left before we get to the end, so plants have started growing. Forests too.

Alaska has the most land and the least population so there is a lot of open space for hardy souls to live out away from it all. They are described to be "off the road" and "off the grid". Some live in places that are accessable by float plane. The Alaska Railway runs a flagstop train every few days that will stop and pick you up or deliver supplies if you live near the track. Others need to hike to the nearest road.

And some appear to have no easy access to any form of transportation.