Snowbird Glacier

Just before posting i completely rewrote this entry, or rather, i deleted it almost entirely! The next post is going to be text heavy, so for this one i just want everyone to enjoy the pictures, some of which i'm very pleased with. These are from a hike to Snowbird Glacier in the Talkeetna Mountains last summer. It was a difficult hike in volatile weather with a big payoff in the end. Getting to the glacier involved some rugged off trail route finding and crossing over the backbone of the mountain range.

Lakes like this are a dime a dozen in the Talkeetnas, and this one wouldn't be worth the effort to get to as a final destination.

From the lake it took 1/2 an hour to get up this boulder field. The rocks were the size of sofas and many of them tilted when you walked on them.

At the top of the boulder field i was met with a boulder canyon. The rocks were covered in abrasive ash from a spring eruption, it was hot, the rocks were too unstable to climb on and all the water was out of reach under the rocks. I didn't like it here.

A stitched panorama after crossing over the pass on the left.
To the right Snowbird Glacier stretches out about a mile.

The main body of the glacier is on the far left. On the far right is the toe of a large stranded area of glacier, now on it's own. The bedrock terraces in between were very recently the bottom of the glacier. The rocks in places like this are highly unstable, having been very gently set down as the ice melted out from underneath them.

This is the glacial tarn on the far right of the previous photo.

Here you can see the granite spire in the middle of the background.

From the glacial cirque the land dropped away quickly. In the distance is the wild remote headwaters of the Kashwitna River.

While wondering around up there i found a climbers hut. I'd heard it was there but somehow i missed it until i was leaving. It's important because i want to go back here as part of a three or 4 day mountain traversal linking several such huts.

Above here is another area where the glacier is breaking apart. The large ice terrace stretches behind the granite tower well to the right and behind me and then connects to the lower ice. On maps the vertical walls of the tower are still shown surrounded by ice

Another angle of the pillar shows what you couldn't see previously.

The zebra striping on the ice is from ash. At the bottom of the spire you can still trace a faint line of exposed, unweathered rock far above ice below. Like a water reservoir (think Lake Powell/Mead) that line marks the recent "high water" mark of the ice.

The light diagonal line of rocks in the middle of this shot is part of that rock canyon i had struggled through earlier in the day. It curves around out of sight. I was not going that way again. Now that i can see that dark mass of rock that takes up the whole left side of the image and compare it to that picture with the connecting boulder field i climbed up from the lake, i'm beginning to
wonder if it is a Rock Glacier.

This place felt like an oasis in the fog.

A short distance after taking the picture above i scared a guy to death. He was camping in the middle of a soft sandy bank. It was a good place to put a tent, but it also was in the middle of the ONLY rational way to navigate the terrain. It was getting late and he had kept track of everyone he had seen that day, so he was sure he was alone. He never accounted for someone passing through who had come from an entirely different area. As i got close to the tent his dog freaked, and he came bounding out of his tent thinking there might be a bear to deal with. We both thought it was funny after he realized what was going on. It's worth mentioning that he looked exactly like Rob Zombie.