The Million Dollar Bridge

We went to Cordova. I would have gone to Cordova long ago but you can't drive there and if you're going to cough up enough money to fly locally in Alaska you may as well cough up a little more and go somewhere warm. So we took the ferry.

We happened to go at the end of a long stretch of fantastic weather. The forecast suggested that our travel day was the last day of good sun for several days, so when we got off the ferry at 7:30pm i decided the best thing to do was to grab something to eat, check into our lodging, and drive out of town to the end of the road.

 The Child's Glacier is three miles wide and several hundred feet high.

That road is  called the Cordova Highway. It's mostly gravel and it goes east out of Cordova for 50 miles before it becomes impassable to cars. It was built originally as a railroad by the familiar names J.P Morgan and the Guggenheim's. The rail line connected Cordova to the 200 mile distant Kennecott Mine in the Wrangells to the Northeast. From the mine the rail originally traveled west until it met the Copper River, at which point it turned south and followed the river as it cut it's way through the Chugach Mountains. The rail then crossed the huge flat delta and terminated in Cordova, where the copper was loaded onto ships. It was built in the early 1900's and abandoned in 1938. About a decade later it was converted into the Copper River Highway and linked Cordova to the rest of the state along Alaska Route 10.

After driving through dense mountains surrounding Cordova the land suddenly opens up into vast wetlands as the highway travels through the extensive Copper River Delta.

 When the highway reaches the center of the delta and crosses the main channel of the river the landscape changes from lush wetlands to what has the look of desert wastelands.

Eventually the highway comes back to the mountains, which erupt up out of the flat delta.

 In this view of the bridge you can see how the section in the foreground (the formerly collapsed section) is more than two feet off of alignment with the rest of the bridge.

Today the road ends on the Cordova side at the Million Dollar Bridge. One section of the bridge collapsed in the 1964 earthquake and the highway has been abandoned ever since. It's truly a bridge to nowhere, but it's a fantastic destination.

The bridge was built in between two enormous glaciers. To the west the Child's Glacier terminates in huge cliffs at the Copper River. Chunks of it break off into the river as you watch from the opposite shore. To the east the Miles Glacier marks the westernmost edge of the 3rd largest icefield on earth. From the Miles Glacier you can travel across ice for over 200 miles, well into Canada. It's a true barrier, and after the Copper River no other inland river makes it to the coast until the Alsek, a distant 250 miles down the coast. The distance in between is what is known as The Lost Coast.

 A fisherman is dwarfed by the Child's Glacier. The river between the glacier and the man in these pictures is a quarter mile wide.

From here, at the bridge, the Miles Glacier looms 5 miles away. The edge of the largest icefield on earth outside of Greenland and Antarctica, continues from here for over 200 miles. It's size distorts perspective. The reason the alpenglow seems to dip closer to the horizon on the right side of the photo is because those mountains are 30 miles more distant than the ones on the left. This is the end of the road.

It's a very interesting location. The Miles and Child's Glaciers follow the same path from opposite directions. The Copper River smashes into the Miles Glacier, turns 90 degrees, goes under the bridge, smashes into the Child's Glacier, turns 90 degrees and then behaves like a normal river. The bridge was damaged along this same line, one section of it is now nearly two feet to the left of the rest of the bridge. It's all part of the barrier between two crustal plates known as part of the Bagley Fault. The Bering Glacier in the neighboring Bagley Icefield also follows the same line for 100 miles. The Copper River, though, had been following it's southward path for many years before the existence of the surrounding Chugach Mountains.