Eklutna Dam

I've been to Eklutna Lake many times to bike or hike or relax but never in winter. We've had a generally snow free winter and in November we had several days of icy fog and low temps that coated many areas in frost, but no snow. I went to Eklutna expecting it would be frozen over but that was absolutely not the case.

Eklutna Lake is about 10 miles long and is a man made reservoir that is the main source of Anchorage's water supply. A trail runs along the East side of the lake along it's length to the point where the stream from Eklutna Glacier runs out of a narrow gorge. Progress beyond that point is technical. The trail is an old road and can be used for walking biking, horses or ATV's.

You can see what the end of the trail is like in these two very old posts from way back in 2007. The pictures were so embarrassingly small i had to quickly remake them. In those posts i rode my bike down to the Mitre, a mile high cliff.

In the summer this whole stretch is smelly iron laden muddy stuff but this day it was mostly frozen. The fog was breaking up just as we arrived.

The ice along the shore was in three or 4 very thin layers. The upper layers were supported by being frozen to the grass and reeds.

A few years ago when we had a ton of rain the lake rose very high and deposited a bunch of driftwood back into the forest. Today it was all frozen together.

There are some weird ruins in the shape of a ships hull.

On this end where the stream leaves the lake the ice was making booming noises as loud as a shotgun. Kona did not like it and started barking at me when i walked out onto it.

They day we went nobody was there. Normally all along the north shore are nasty seeps covered in reeds but since everything was frozen I decided to walk through that stuff towards what is a nice beach area in summer. We wandered around beyond that and followed the outlet stream until we arrived at Eklutna Dam.

I had never been to the dam so that was interesting. It's not a very high dam but it's very high above the water so that if the lake was full most of the trees along the current shoreline would be underwater. I didn't know it had that capacity.

The dam. The lake level had dropped about 8 feet since the ice had formed and so it collapsed but in some places was more bent than broken.

There were large voids under the ice and it's thickness was highly variable.

The ice had sublimated around the edges and frosted just enough on top that it looked like big pieces of candy.

Kona foolishly stands on an extremely thin layer of ice, despite me telling her to stay away.

I had nothing to do that day but to invite disaster by crawling under the ice. It was crazy that underneath the surface the rocks and ground were completely dry. I don't know how that happened.