Sam And Saundra's Year Long Adventure - Part 168

Sam And Saundra’s Year Long Adventure – Part 168

Alaska

8/13/09-8/15/08  - Salmon Glacier, near Hyder, Alaska

Wide Spot

We head up the narrow, gravel road that goes to the Wildlife Viewing Area – but this time, we pass it.  We are in search of Salmon Glacier.  We know it is in this direction, but since we took our information books out of Brutus (and we do not tend to check them too closely anyway) that is all we know.  We drive up.  We drive up a narrow, windy gravel road.  We drive up a narrow, windy road that has no shoulders.  I like shoulders.  This narrow, windy, gravel road with no shoulders soon has nothing to one side of it.  I am not ready for this.  I close my eyes.  If I happen to open them, I do not look for vehicles coming the other direction. No, I want Sam to have good hearing in the years to come.  Instead, if I have to peek, I look up the sheer cliffs on my side.  Alpine grassy areas can be glimpsed if I look high enough, past all the crumbly looking rock at my side of the road.  I close my eyes a lot.  When Sam is able to find wide spots, he pulls over so I can look.  WOW! 

Salmon Glacier Climbing Mountain Range

Even though Sam offers to turn around, I tell him I want to go on.  The Salmon Glacier has started. It looks like a river or in some places the ice is so full of ground up mountain mass, that it looks like land.  It is amazing.  On and up it goes as we edge along the side of it, going up with it.  You would think that with the number of tourists that must come up this way, that this road would be a freeway.  I think that probably the inaccessible wilderness part, the great masses of snow, plus the perma-frost and all that gibberish, keeps this road and the view of this glacier, a unique experience.  Imagine seeing a glacier below you. The glacier looks like it is climbing the mountain range. Very long and wide, it rises and swooshes into a turn, up and away from the road onto a mountain range.  Viewed from the rest stop just before ‘summit’, the grandeur cannot be ignored.  Insignificant ones like us, can begin to unfurl our clinched fists and breath a few moments without  fear of slipping down onto or into the glacier from above.  It is vast.  The crevices are vast. Everything about this is vast.  Take a good camera, food/water, binoculars and blinders (if you are not the driver), to make this trip more enjoyable.  Be amazed!

Looking Down