9/25 – 9/26/20
9-25
Here in Seward, the season is over. The sidewalks are empty, half the shops are closed, and the campgrounds are awash in vacancies. With little else to do, I walked a handful of desolate streets, and strolled down a stony beach in tentative sunshine. Then, having reserved a ticket on one of the year’s last boat tours of Kenai Fjords National Park, I headed to the harbor.
The tour was a nice change of pace. Though no whales surfaced, I saw seals lounging on rocks, male sea lions battling for territory, a black bear stumping up a rocky slope, and a school of porpoises playing around the boat.
The real star, however, was the landscape. Waterfalls roared, sea stacks reared from the sea, and mountains towered in the distance, crowned by the glittering ramparts of the Harding Ice Field.
For a riveting half-hour, the boat idled in front of electric blue Aialik Glacier.
After the boat returned to Seward, I cooked dinner at a turnout overlooking the Resurrection River, and camped beneath a golden grove of aspens.
9-26
I don’t mind cold. I can cope with rain. But a relentless downpour, whipped by freezing winds and charged with sleet – well, that just sucks. My itinerary, however, was inflexible, and it called for a hike up the Harding Icefield trail – the best, but also the hardest, trek in this corner of Alaska.
The few couple miles weren’t bad. The rain was steady, but nothing my rain gear couldn’t handle. I paused for pictures of brooding clouds and shrouded mountains.
As I climbed, however, the rain intensified. Although my jacket kept most of the water out, my supposedly waterproof hiking pants and day pack did not. I was briefly distracted when clouds parted over the valley below, and rays of sunlight streamed picturesquely through the rain. Then a new wave of clouds closed the scene.
As the trail climbed above the tree line, the pale blue ice of Exit Glacier, one of the dozens of glaciers that flows from the icefield, appeared below, and the icefield itself began to glimmer on the horizon.
The wind grew stronger as I climbed, whipping rain into the few remaining dry patches on my sodden pants. Sleet peppered my face. Finally, on a high ridge unpleasantly exposed to the weather, the icefield opened underfoot, fissured and seamed with crevasses. Mountain peaks, buried almost to their summits, protruded here and there from the broken plain.
I ate lunch, watching low clouds trail streamers of snow over the icefield. Then I hiked almost to the ice’s edge; but at the top of a steep slope just above it, I turned around, too cold and wet to bother with the final descent. I have nothing good to say about the return hike.
<<<Ice and Fog
Homer Stretch>>>