Alaskan Fall of 2013

It already seems like a distant memory but we had the warmest October on record in south central Alaska this year. It was fantastic. Unfortunately that was AFTER fall. Fall colors in this part of the state happen in September, and it was one of the rainiest Septembers i can remember. If fact, we broke another record, for most number of days of rain in a row. It also snowed at the beginning of the month. Due to all the rain and appointments i could not change i wasn't able to get out for fall pictures on the few nice days that we had that month.

In Alaska we don't get a lot of red or orange trees, but we have a lot of yellow trees. The red colors appear on the ground.

Winter had already settled in to the high peaks of the central Chugach.

On October 1, definitely past the peak of fall coloring, i finally had a day off during nice weather so i headed out into the Matanuska Valley. A few miles beyond Chickaloon the highway winds up and down a long line of rocky cliffs that alternate between bands of low grade coal incongruously intertwined with deposits of what looks like igneous rock. Some of the cliffs are very high over the highway so i always assumed the view must be quite good up there.

Below the road the Matanuska River braids it's way through the valley.

I was right, the view was spectacular. Getting to the view isn't pleasant, but it's not too hard. The highest cliffs are directly above Long Lake but they are very inaccessible looking from that point so i drove 2 miles farther up the road to the unfortunately named Weiner Lake. That of course adds some hiking time back to the high cliffs but it's well worth cutting off 500 feet of elevation and it's a much easier route to the top.

We quickly made it up to a high ridge, but it was the wrong one.

The wrong ridge did offer a great view, but we were going a lot higher.

There is a trail across the street from Weiner Lake which dissipated pretty quickly, but not before leading up onto the wrong ridge. From there i just decided to bite the bullet and bushwack directly up the steep slope (steep enough i had to push the dog up the hill a couple of times) until i was on the proper ridge. I couldn't believe there was no human trail up there because the views make it a no-brainer of a hiking goal. I could tell it was not a popular place because whenever i tried to grab a tree for support it would fall over. Once on top it was easy walking through small patches of alder and fields of blueberries and tundra. We walked along the ridge to the high point above long lake.

We had to push our way through head height grass for a while. I little nerve wracking during hunting season, and moose rutting season,, and late bear foraging season. The Talkeetnas, not visible from the road, began to rise in the distance.

Getting deeper.

The head high grass gave way to patchy waist high grass and Kona started to hunt for mice.

Climbing up along the high cliffs the rock looked volcanic to me.

We made it up to the high ridge. For the rest of the trip the view was spectacular and the walking was easy.

The most interesting thing about the view was that from on top of the ridge you could see many other parallel ridges of the same rock filling up the valley between the two mountain ranges. Up close it definitely looked volcanic to me.

Later i tried to do some research on this and found out that they don't really have a clear picture of what happened in the Matanuska Valley. So, attention all you geology graduates looking for a thesis idea: I can tell you there's a lot of cool stuff going on up here that needs to be studied!

A few odd patches of dense spruce showed up on the top.

I did find one paper online but it was only available for purchase. I'm not buying the paper butfrom the abstract i'll surmise that the strange patterns of rocky ridges are magma intrusions that likely trace a pattern of fault fractures between the plates (the valley is a major faultline between two plates). It gets really confusing because not only do intrusions cause inconsistencies in the rock layers but there is the added confusion of the valley probably being composed partially of ophiolites.

It gets even more confusing because the lower Matanuska Valley has a whole lot of coal in it, leading up to granite! So you have petrified trees (near where i was) in organic rocks capped off by igneous rocks typically formed deep underground.