We’ve reached the end of our journey…Alsek lake. As we awoke yesterday morning, we busily broke camp, had breakfast and shoved off around 10:30am. We were glad to be out of “Purple Haze” camp due to the swarms of veracious mosquitoes that drove everybody mad. Dinner was a disaster! Dessert sat un-eaten as we all took refuge in our tents.
The sun broke out, in all its glory, the next morning and we all changed out of our layers and put on shorts and tank tops, for about 2 hours we soaked up the sun and stared at the ice capped mountains surrounding camp once again. 360 degrees of the most serene beauty one could imagine. Just when you think it can’t get any more stunning, the bar gets raised.
In the beginning of our trip, we encountered small burgie-bits. We had finally found glaciers! It was called Walker Glacier but you can no longer walk to or on it since it has receded and left a huge lake of little icebergs and a lot of tangled trees and muck, sticky, gooey muck. But today we’ve hit the mother load…Alsek Lake!
We spent all day watching the icebergs roll and calve. We even got to row the rafts around the icebergs floating in the bay. These things were massive and apparently can roll without notice. The tops that were exposed most of the time was the bluest blue you can imagine. As the sun shined through they would glow like a blue sapphire. The ones that rolled usually expose a rocky grey muddy bottom that has been dragged through the bottom of the lake.
A glacier is an amazing thing. It can be blue or grey or white. Usually are thick and fill a deep crevice at the top of the mountains. Some come all the way down to the lakes and rivers; others have receded high into the mountain valley and formed formidable cliffs of ice.
The lake was in constant motion and we watched the icebergs as they journeyed their way, crashing into one another, creating deep thunderous scrapping sounds. It was quite eerie. Had the lake in front of our camp not been clogged with heavy berges, the waves set off by the turning and crashing into each other could have swamped the camp. Huge piles of logs marked the high water line, and we were told to set our tents up above the debris line.
Our last morning, we woke up to a thick layer of fog for our 4am wake up. We hurried to get out of camp and to Dry Bay for our flight extraction from there to Yukatat. We floated for about 2 hours in the fog with visibility under 50’. Arriving we disassemble the three rafts and broke down all the gear. A family with ATVs and trailers came to picked up the colorful piles of dry bags and coolers, paddles and oar frames.
We all hurried about up and down the rocky beach, carrying whatever we could carry. Then hopped on the trailer and were taken to the airport, a gravel runway between a clearing of alders.
Arriving at the bush airport, we were told that the pilot that was coming to get us and his wife went out with a friend in his plane and had gone missing. Our pilot was not going to be able to pick us up nor was anyone else in the small village of Dry Bay. All pilots were running search and rescue.
So here we sit at the bush pilot airport. We will probably miss our flight to Juneau tonight.
Two Travelin' Chicas... 