Wrangell-St Elias, Kennecott and The Root Glacier – July 3

 

Today was long anticipated as we hiked on a glacier.  But I mustn’t let my excitement for the glacier override the splendid morning we enjoyed exploring The Kennecott Copper Mine.  Actually, it was the mill we toured where tons of rock was crushed, sifted, sorted, and washed to extract the copper before  bagging it for transport on a rail car.  The mill, made entirely of wood, is falling apart and has been somewhat shored up enough by the national parks to allow visitors to enter and explore alongside a guide.  The mill is a maze of chutes, belts, sifting tables, rickety steep stairways, and mysterious rusting equipment. What buildings in the town have been restored are beautiful in their red and white paint and were simply fascinating to tour.  In operation from 1911 to 1939, the mill and the four mines which supplied it brought in millions of dollars and employed thousands of men.  This is where the term Mother Lode originated and what put Alaska on the map as a territory rich in natural resources.

 

Following our Kennecott tour, we embarked on a most unique adventure; hiking to and along a glacier, the Root Glacier.  Fully 27 miles long, we barely hiked a tiny piece of it, but oh what a piece.  The impossible blue stripes of ice with equally mesmerizing blue holes captivated us for a couple of hours.  We first hiked the moraine alongside what appeared to be huge hills of dirt but which were actually dirt-crusted mountains of moving ice, then we crossed onto the toe of and up onto the actual ice flow, across rivulets of melting ice, and up and down valleys and across crevices of this massive glacier.  One young couple we watched actually, ridiculously, impossibly, dove into an icy blue hole.    

 

One fascinating feature we encountered is named a Moulin.  A Moulin forms when a deep blue hole filled with water encounters a hot day (such as yesterday) which causes the plug in the bottom to melt and the blue hole to empty its icy contents into the deep recesses of the glacier.  This draining hole, which resembles a bathtub with the plug pulled, had a waterfall flowing into and over its steep ledge before plunging hundreds of feet to a lake deep below in the glacier.  Eerie, beautiful, frightening, mesmerizing…it was fascinating and wild beyond anything we’ve ever seen or done before...hiking on a glacier.  I can now die happy.