Matanuska Glacier

Last August, Marel's childhood friend Matt came to visit, so we took the opportunity to take him sightseeing at some places we've never been before. One of them was the Matanuska Glacier, which is about a two hour drive north of here. It's perhaps the most accessible glacier around here, as far as being able to get to it and walk around on it. It's also unusual in that it's sort of privately controlled. The glacier itself is apparently on public land, but the road to get to it from the highway is on private property, so the people who own the property run a check station and gift shop and collect an entrance fee. There is a state recreation area right off the highway with campsites and such with a view of the glacier, although it's still a couple miles off. We stopped there on the way for lunch.

After lunch we headed to the checkpoint to pay our fee and sign our liability waivers and then we were off towards the foot of the glacier.

It's very unusual terrain at the terminus of a glacier. We started on a normal dirt path but as we approached the glacier it seemed the ground became a little different every hundred feet.

We quickly got to a muddy area where glacial silt was saturated with runoff water. They had metal grates over the path through the muddy part.

While muddy, the ground in this part appeared pretty solid, but when Celia stepped off the grate, the silty mud immediately went right to the top of her boots. I'm sure she would have sunk deeper if we hadn't caught her so quickly.

Before long we were back on solid earth, or what appeared to be earth. We quickly realized that it was ice with dirt and rocks over the top.

As we kept going, there started to be little crevasses all over the place, and the girls really liked throwing rocks down them. Each crevasse made a slightly different noise when rocks were dropped in, and there was one that seemed to make a distinctly metallic clang, which we found pretty interesting.

Then we got to the giant chunks of ice.

There are professional guide services that will take people up on the glacier. A few were doing actual ice climbing, but most were just hiking around like we were. While the people with the guides were walking around with crampons and helmets like real mountaineers, there we were with our kids and our baby in a backpack, and we did just fine.

We played around at this little pond for a while. There was a large area that looked like open water but was actually only an inch or less deep, and it imperceptibly changed from that to the deeper parts. The girls found a spot to make rocks disappear. There was apparently a hole just under the surface of the water. It looked just like the surrounding area where the water was an inch deep, but when we threw a big rock there it completely disappeared. It's a good thing they didn't try to puddle jump there!

All in all the Matanuska Glacier was like being on another world. Everything was so different from any other place we've ever, and there were always little surprises like the metallic crevasse and the disappearing rocks. It's one of highlights of the sights we've seen in Alaska.