Last weekend, Cassidy, Elliott, Jules, and I were back on the Gulkana Glacier. We drove down late Friday night to camp near the trailhead. It was my third trip on the ice this year, and I hoped to put in as many miles as the snow conditions would allow.

This would give me an opportunity to do some repeat photography in a branch I haven’t visited in 5 years. One of the reasons I like visiting the Gulkana Glacier is to document changes in the glacier over the years. It’s one thing to read about the effects of climate change, but it still feels shocking to have witnessed so many changes to Alaska’s glaciers in the 16 years since I moved here. It also turned out to be one of the most “blue sky” days I’ve ever had here, so I should note that this will be one of my most media-rich posts yet. Although still a small subset of the over 350 photos and videos I took overall.

There’s still a lot of daylight, although it is starting to get dark now. Sunset was going to be at 10:24, but nautical twilight is as dark as it gets, just enough to see some of the brighter stars. We managed to get on the trail at 9:45 am, so there was plenty of time to log some good mileage.

A snowbridge has remained intact for most of the summer this year, allowing us to get across the glacier outflow onto the tongue. Often I have to either ford or jump across a spot on bedrock at this time of year, but we had a snowy, cold winter, leaving us with persistent snowpack and a lower-than-normal snowline.

On our way to our first destination, the Gabriel Icefall, we stopped at a few moulins because of my fascination with surface hydrology.

It was easy work getting to the ridge overlooking the icefall, the best view to rest and eat before heading out to the icy playground.

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The first weekend in August, we planned on hiking Granite Tors in the Chena River State Recreation Area. We left slightly later than planned, and smoke from a wildfire across the Nenana River near Clear hung in the air. Checking the air quality, it looked questionable where we were going, about 45 miles outside of town.

But when we arrived, the haze was pretty thick. Deciding it wasn’t worth the hike, especially if the air quality could get worse, we headed back into town to find a place that might be a little better.

Looked like our options were the White Mountains National Recreation Area and Denali National Park. But we wanted to bring the dogs, so we settled on the Whites. Neither Cassidy nor Lucie had done the entire Mt. Prindle hike from Nome Creek, so we drove to Nome Creek.

Cassidy and I had been out here with Elliott, and a couple of the recent grads from Team Ascension backpacked out here in June, but turned back at the tors known as the Windchimes because of both the amount of snow and exhaustion.

Since we already lost some time driving out to Granite Tors and back, we didn’t get to the trailhead until almost 2 pm, determined to make the 16+ mile hike.

After two creek crossings, we put our shoes on and made our way quickly along the trail. It was drier than earlier in the summer. Mostly.

The wind hit us as soon as we reached the first ridge of small tors, only giving us short breaks as we wove between the granite rocks.

One thing I really love about this hike is how hidden the objective is. The summit of Mt. Prindle is roughly 8 miles in. It’s a granitic pluton and the tallest peak in the one-million-acre White Mountains National Recreation Area, and the first view you get of it is about mile 6, when you are less than two miles from the summit.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get any sun along the ridge, so the light was pretty flat. The wind kept getting stronger as we hiked, too.

The granite towers of the Windchimes dwarf the first set of tors. We found a windless spot to stop and have our 6 pm “lunch” break, still a little over a mile to go, and another 8 miles to return.

The crazy wind continued at the summit. We stopped for a few minutes to take photos and video, but there isn’t much of a way to shelter from the wind up top, so we didn’t stay for long. We turned around at 7:30 pm, so we had made pretty decent time.

It always feels like the descent should go faster, but it never does. It’s almost entirely downhill, only a couple of climbs for the return, but it’s tough on the joints and the talus is difficult on my feet.

I didn’t take many photos on the return, as we were trying to get back as quickly as possible and it was getting dark. We crossed the creeks and made it back to the car a few minutes before midnight. Cassidy and I were both about 0.2 miles short of 17 miles, so we ran a lap around the campground. It ended up a great hike, especially considering we had no idea that’s what we’d be doing that day.

Full Photo Gallery From The Hike

This summer has gone by fast. I’ve been having some true moments of panic thinking about how much time is left, especially considering all I want to do before winter sets in.

We left for the Deltas Friday night, this time with Elliott, Cassidy, and Cassidy's mom Sarka and sister Lucie. Our plan was to hike out to the College Glacier, possibly out to the boulders I found last year if conditions allowed. The following day we were going to find another hike, possibly the Castner Fels Divide or something in the Miller Creek, Rainbow Basin area.

What made this trip different: I forgot to pack my Trazodone. I had my other anxiety and depression meds and the blood pressure ones, but the moment I pulled out my pill container I realized the one I rely on to fall asleep wasn't there. It helps with anxiety too, less so, and that was the smaller loss. The real problem is that without it I don't get sleepy at all. But try telling someone with severe anxiety that one missing medication isn't a big deal.

I can’t go further without noting the view on the drive down. We had a late start on Friday night, passing by Delta Junction shortly before sunset. Just before 11 pm, when the sun was only slightly above the horizon behind us, we had one of the tallest rainbows I’ve ever seen, due to the sun’s position on the horizon as we entered the Alaska Range. And it was bright.

We found a place to camp near the Gulkana/College Glaciers trailhead at midnight. Cassidy, Elliott, and I set up our tents; Sarka and Lucie were sleeping in their cars. That’s when I discovered the missing Trazodone.

I think I first mentioned it to Cassidy when I overheard Lucie saying something about how she hadn’t been able to fall asleep before 3 am. She had been in Australia for the last year and had returned about a week ago. I certainly had no chance of falling asleep anytime soon, so the two of us decided to take a walk out along the Gulkana Glacier Trail.

We chatted while we walked, Lucie about her travels in Australia and Southeast Asia, and I talked about the area and some of the trips Cassidy and I had done recently. The air was crisp, and the wind calm as we slowly walked out to a local climbing boulder up on an old moraine.

Turning around at about 2 am got us back to camp a little before 3. I think it was my first time crossing the suspension bridge in the dark.

From camp, noctilucent clouds stretched across the sky. Noctilucents are high clouds, 250-280 thousand feet (76 to 85 km) in altitude, that are lit by the sun long after it’s dipped below the horizon. The long twilight hours this time of the year are what make them observable.

These clouds only exist in summer. The polar summer mesopause is the coldest place in the whole atmosphere, colder than the winter one, because the mesospheric circulation drives upwelling and adiabatic cooling up there in summer. That's cold enough, around minus 130 C, for the tiny bit of water up there to freeze onto dust. So, counterintuitively, the highest, coldest clouds we get form in the warmest season, and traditionally only at high latitudes, though in recent years they've been spotted much farther south.

I didn’t sleep. Not one minute.

The rest of the group started waking up shortly before 8 am. I worked on my coffee to feel a little more alive. Eating breakfast has been difficult for me on most of my outdoor trips. I’ve struggled to have much of an appetite at all, and the missing sleep didn’t help. The appetite and sleep trouble are patterns of anxiety and depression for me, which is the strange part, since being out in the wilderness usually settles me rather than the reverse. I snacked on some granola, but couldn’t really stomach anything else.

We were on the trail at about 11 am. Actually, there’s no trail to the College Glacier, but it mostly involves following College Creek up the valley. This was my third hike out here, and I always forget how much harder it is than the distance suggests. It's only about 4 miles, a mile more than the nearby Gulkana Glacier hike, but the valley is narrower, the route harder to read, and you don't see the glacier until you're nearly on top of it. The gnats were absolutely atrocious the whole walk out. Impossible to keep out of your eyes, nose, and mouth.

Small-flowered anemone (Anemone parviflora)

The snowline was at 5190 feet, almost exactly the same elevation as we found the snowline on the main trunk of the Gulkana, only 2 miles apart, two weeks earlier. The shaded College basin was melting out more slowly than the sunnier Gulkana trunk. Unfortunately, this left us about a quarter of a mile short of the boulders we had hoped to hike to. I attempted to find an agreeable path through the isothermal and saturated snow, but it would have left us all soaked.

Cassidy and I decided to try to find a new route back to camp on the other side of the valley, based on an area we saw on a hike earlier in the season. It was certainly going to require more elevation gain and would likely be a bit longer and more difficult, so the two of us broke off from the rest of the group.

We walked along the western margin of the glacier, stopping at a narrow channel incised into the ice, where the stream dropped into the glacier and re-emerged from its base about 300 meters away.

From the glacier toe, our plan was to go up to a ridge along the hillside and follow that out to the old lateral moraine on the Gulkana Glacier, the same one that the boulder sits on that Lucie and I visited the night before. Or, I guess technically, earlier that morning.

Hiking up the loose talus field was steeper than I had expected, but after a while we were on the ridge, which offered much easier walking on alpine tundra and some snow.

The route dumped us out near the old lateral moraine overlooking the Gulkana Glacier. We could have cut across, angling down toward the river, but I really wanted to get a look at the Gulkana from an angle I haven’t seen it from yet, so we detoured to the top of the moraine.

The walk back along the moraine felt like a real slog on very unstable footing and big talus. Perfect for our tired legs and feet.

It wasn’t a terribly long hike; we finished at 12.3 miles and 3058 feet of elevation gain, but my feet were hurting at the end from all the talus scrambling.

We met up with Elliott and Lucie, who had just beaten us back to camp by 30 minutes, even with our excursion out over the Gulkana. Sarka had left for home. The four of us packed up camp to head for Red Rock Canyon to camp and get ready for the next day.

Rainbow Basin

Everyone was tired the next day, including the dogs. Elliott and Lucie decided to call it and head home with the exhausted pups, and maybe find a short hike to do on the way back.

I slept, but only a few hours. And not well. Somehow I still had some energy in me, though. Cassidy had wanted to go up into the Rainbow Basin since I did my late-night into early-morning hike earlier in the month. Despite also being tired, she still wanted to give it a shot. Especially given my description of rolling alpine tundra.

It was about a 3-mile walk up the Canwell Valley before turning up into the Rainbow Basin area. As soon as we hit it, we crossed a small meadow filled with wildflowers.

We were both dismayed by my poor memory of the terrain. I definitely remembered it being much more rolling and less consistently steep. Some of that was probably exhaustion from the day before. But I think I was also just wrong. We took lots of rests.

Maybe only slightly redeeming, we did hit rolling alpine tundra for about the last half-mile of the hike. So, I was only 90% wrong on my assessment.

We started hiking up a talus field toward a ridge, not really having a plan. It kept getting steeper and was very exposed on loose rock. As tired as we both were, I didn’t feel like it would be safe to keep going, knowing it would definitely be more difficult to descend. We decided to come back and try again another day when we were more rested.

I have no idea why the combination footpath and Jeep Trail along the Canwell Glacier valley always feels so long on the way back, but this day was no exception. At least my company was good, and we had some great conversation along the way. I’m hoping that we’ll have another trip out here this year, but with so much to do and things going by so fast, I’m not sure where it sits on the priorities.

Full Trip Photo Gallery

A week after Jules and I hiked up to the Gabriel Icefall, I was back with Cassidy and Elliott. I had wanted to bring Jules out to the cliff top overlooking the icefall, but there was too much snow bridging the glacier and the rocky outcrop, and I wasn’t carrying a probe or rope for that trip.

This time I brought my snow probe.

Just a day trip this time. No camping. After the drive down, we got started on the trail around noon. The sky was blue with just a few clouds.

Other than getting to the top of the cliffs that Jules and I weren’t able to reach the previous week because of snow, we didn’t have an objective beyond seeing how far we could get before hitting the snowline. Wander. Explore. Take photos.

We stopped at a few moulins along the way. Moulins are the shafts where meltwater drains down into and through the glacier, and they usually run. One of the first we came across (photo below) was filled with water and not draining at all. Those still ones hold the deepest blue, dotted with sediment caught in little pockets in the ice. A moulin can stop draining for a few reasons: it can get clogged with rock and sediment, it can lose its connection to the englacial or bedrock drainage below, or the subglacial system can just be too slow to keep up, which often happens early in the melt season.

What stopped Jules and me the previous week was a roughly 100-foot stretch of snow between the bare ice and the bedrock, in a heavily crevassed area. This trip, a rope didn't seem worth it, so I brought the snow probe instead, to check that whatever we stepped on had ice under it, not a hidden void. (video below from Cassidy).

We spent about an hour and a half up top eating and exploring the seracs at the edge of the icefall. As we did, clouds moved in from the north. The snowline had receded a fair amount in the last week, so we continued up the icefall to see how far we could get.

It was only another quarter of a mile uphill before we were blocked by the snowline and a mess of crevasses. But we were able to find a path down to the top of the icefall, giving us a new vantage of the icefall we’d been below earlier.

We had a lot of fun out on the ice, a lot of joking and laughing. By the time we quit, we'd only covered 10.75 miles and 2,500 feet of gain, but we'd been out almost seven hours. We weren't in a hurry to be anywhere

Since this trip, we've been back once more, farther up the glacier than either time before. I came away with a piece of repeat photography, the same view five years apart, showing how much one branch of the icefall has changed. That's for the next post.

Full Photo Gallery

It started out as our third day in Hatcher Pass. It was July 3rd. It ended over 150 miles away, as the crow flies, in a different mountain range. But it didn’t really end. Three hikes blended into one. There was an anxiety attack.

It was foggy and overcast in Archangel Valley. It rained heavily the previous day. The forecast had more rain coming in the evening, which was supposed to continue through the weekend, so we figured we'd be looking for bluer skies and drier rock when we were done here.

We got a later start than planned. But we also went our separate ways. Cassidy and I were on our way to the Reed Lakes Trail while the rest of the group went to climb.

We were already time-limited, having agreed to meet the group by 2 or 2:30. Sometime around then. And it was overcast. I didn't take many photos on the way up.

There were a lot of people on the trail. Not quite as many as there were on the Harding Icefield Trail earlier in the week, but still a lot.

Neither of us had hiked the Reed Lakes Trail. The description said a talus portion was not passable for dogs. Despite getting a little spooked early on, Astra did spectacularly, quickly scrambling across the boulderfield and up the creek.

Beyond the talus we climbed into the cloud, running out of time and wondering if we were going to be able to go all the way up to the upper lake.

Lower Reed Lake was in the fog and mostly ice-covered. My anxiety was already elevated from all the passing on the way up, and the crowd scattered across the tundra spiked it more than I expected. I’m not a big fan of hiking around people, especially groups, and I hate leapfrogging. There are multiple parking areas for the trail, and ours was very full, so I had no way to do my usual count to prepare mentally for how many people we might encounter.

I’m still really friendly and courteous on the trail. Way more so than most of the people I encounter. It’s just that every interaction, every person we pass leaves a little wake of turbulence in my head.

We'd hit the turnaround time we'd need to make it back to the group. We both wanted to keep going, and talked over whether the upper lake was worth being a little late. But the fog wasn't lifting, and we did want to get on the road. We turned around.

Backtracking, we got to the parking area shortly after 2 pm and drove back to camp to meet the group. My first 7.8 miles and 1,800 feet of elevation gain were behind me.

I'd been checking weather forecasts for the whole state for about a day, another version of the same anxiety-related counting. After striking camp, the caravan was off to the Deltas in the Eastern Alaska Range.

Hike 2: Overnight in the Rainbow Basin

Between the number of people on the Reed Lakes Trail and the close quarters with our group, my social battery was running low. I love all of them, have been working with them at the gym for years, but that doesn’t change my underlying social anxiety. I can fully handle a smaller dynamic; I was perfectly happy with Cassidy and Elliott, I had been riding with them this whole trip, and we were on day 8. But with the rest of the group added in, the turbulence in my head was building.

We shared music for much of the five-hour drive. While we had thoughts on where we might camp, there wasn’t a plan; we were just going to wing it based on where the weather looked the best.

Our first stop was near the Gulkana Glacier. There was a boulder nearby that no one in the group had climbed on before, though Cassidy and I had checked it out while hiking in June. The rock looked great. Of course, there is plenty of hiking in the area for those of us not wanting to climb. I liked the idea of staying here; there were great spots for tents, no one else was camped in the area, and it was already past 11 pm. But the group outnumbered me, and they wanted to find a spot in Red Rock Canyon. So we went back on the road.

By the time we got to Red Rock Canyon, it was past 11:30. On the way in, RVs filled the steep initial canyon. People were biking and running ATVs around the makeshift town. Continuing up the road, we found that most of the better camping spots, including the one Cassidy and I stayed at the previous month, were taken. We turned around and found a large open spot to stay.

Shortly after setting up camp, the fireworks started. My low social battery immediately dropped to zero. I don’t come out to the backcountry to hear fireworks. I’m well aware that this is a very popular off-roading spot, another reason I wasn’t keen to camp here on the Fourth of July weekend. We chose to be here, so I tried to make peace with it. But I was past my tipping point.

I packed my bag. I think at this point, everyone guessed I was going to go hiking; the anxiety was readable. Cassidy asked me to wake her and let her know when I returned. I agreed, and then started up the road.

My mind was spinning, and it was getting a little dark (as dark as it gets in early July in Alaska), so I didn’t take many photos along the way. I hiked 4 miles up the road, taking a footpath nearby when possible. I kicked up a ptarmigan at the same spot we saw one three weeks ago. I remember wishing Cassidy was with me to see it.

I turned uphill into the Rainbow Basin, the same hike I did as a solo overnight backpacking trip 8 years ago. By 3 am I was up in the snow at the head of the basin. The sun was already rising. I wanted to keep going. But I also didn’t want to be incapacitated by exhaustion the next day. I turned back. Head still spinning.

The video above shows the area with my narration about glaciers that once existed in this valley. I misspeak here and call the Canwell Glacier the Cantwell Glacier. The Cantwell Glacier is in Denali National Park.

I stopped by Cassidy and Elliott’s tent on the way back and tried to softly tell Cassidy that I was back and what time it was. I heard a little mumble, but not much response. At my tent, throwing my pack in the vestibule and untying my shoes, I wasn't sure she'd heard me. I’d promised to let her know when I was back. I walked back over and said a little louder, “Cassidy, I’m back.”

She responded, “ok, was the hike good?"

“Yes,” I replied.

“Did you say it was 5 am?”

“Yes.”

This brought my total distance to 19 miles and 3,800 feet of elevation gain. I had 2.5 hours to sleep before the group was waking up.

Hike 3: Gulkana Glacier

Waking up at 7:30, I wasn’t as tired as I had expected. I stayed in my sleeping bag until just before 8, when the group was supposed to be getting up. Everyone kind of pitter-pattered their way through breakfast. It was heavily overcast, but not raining. I set a timer for Lacey eating her bagel.

While people were eating, we saw the truck that was parked in the better campsite leave. Quick decision time: could we grab their spot? Clearly, Lacey wasn’t going anywhere soon, so I packed up my tent as fast as possible, threw it in Jules's car, the only one not blocked in and ready to go, and we drove out to the other campsite.

It was still open. I set up my tent in an obvious spot so no one else would be tempted, and we drove back to tell the group the good news.

I have no idea how long it took Lacey to eat her bagel.

By 11 am, the new camp was set up, and we were off to find dry rock. First, we drove back to the Gulkana Glacier area, where we had been just 12 hours earlier. The rain started just south of our campsite as we passed Rainbow Ridge on the Richardson Highway, and it rained hard all the way to the Richardson Monument, which overlooks the Gulkana Glacier Valley.

From the monument, dark clouds were stuck in the valley and everywhere south. It was dumping.

So we turned around and drove north toward the Black Rapids Glacier overlook. Most of the group planned to climb. I was definitely hiking. Cassidy and Jules were hyped to hike, but Cassidy was also stressed about homework after hardly spending any time on it in a week and a half. It’s one of the few times I recommended she not go with me; it wasn’t worth the stress, and we’d be out hiking in the area soon enough. Jules and I decided to drive south again and find somewhere on the edge of the rain to hike, but had no real plan.

As I carried my pack from Cassidy’s car to Jules’s, I dropped one of my full Nalgene bottles, and the thing hit the pavement and split clean in half. All three of us were kind of stunned. I’ve seen broken bottles before, but never like this.

We said bye to Cassidy, letting her know that we’d message her updates through my InReach, and jumped back on the road.

It was about 1:30 as we passed Red Rock Canyon. The sky looked much clearer south past Rainbow Ridge than it did earlier. I chuckled at the thought of it being clear down at the Gulkana Glacier; a few hours earlier it had looked like the kind of rain that wouldn't let up for a day or more.

But it was sunny. So we kept driving.

Jules got excited about the prospect of hiking out to the Gulkana, something she'd been wanting to do for a while. It was starting to look like she'd get to.

We reached the Richardson Monument for the second time that day. Blue skies over the glacier.

As we started, I warned Jules that I probably wasn't going to move very fast. She's a notoriously strong and fast hiker; as I'm writing this, she's out hiking the 27-mile Pinnell Mountain Trail in a day. I was tired from the miles I'd already done, and my body hadn't had time to recover.

The trail hits a single-file suspension bridge early on. It spooks a lot of people, and they take their time crossing. And there were a fair number of people on the trail, so I sped up to get us ahead of everyone. We crossed the bridge and never slowed back down.

It only took us 45 minutes to get to the glacier toe (about 3 miles from the car). That might be a record for me, definitely a record while hiking with another person. We maintained a steady pace up on the ice too, stopping a few times to look at moulins (video below), and so I could go over glacier dynamics and safety with Jules.

As we moved into the Gabriel Icefall, dark clouds rolled back in and brought scattered showers. Most of the time, it was light enough that we didn’t need to put on rain gear.

I messaged with Cassidy a bit along the way, sending some photos from the glacier through my InReach. She messaged back that she was feeling a little jealous, and it made me feel bad for sending them. I know she really wanted to go. And I really wanted her here. I reassured her that we’d be out here together soon.

The snowline sat right about at the icefall, so we couldn't safely venture much further. The cliffs overlooking the icefall were also shut off by snow. Without ropes or my snow probe, crossing wasn't an option; the area is heavily crevassed. But there was plenty of exposed ice heading up into the glacier, so we put on our microspikes and continued.

Eventually the snow closed off everything ahead of us. We were overlooking massive ice cliffs, so I made Jules walk out toward the edge to capture the scale in the video below.

We turned around, my third reversal in a day and a half. The sun poked out of the clouds again. The return had some of the most dramatic light I've seen out here.

I fell twice while jumping over isothermal snow streams, snow at the melting point all the way through, with no strength left. This was stupid both times; I just misjudged how far it was to the other side, and my heel landed short, going into the slushy snow. At least Jules got a good laugh, and I got the video below, hoping maybe she'd slip too; instead, I got a smug look.

Somehow, I kept up my pace for the return. Maybe I actually slowed down a little, but it felt good to keep moving. The anxiety was mostly quiet for the hike, a welcome change.

That was the end of my walking. Closing out with 28 miles and 6,000 feet of elevation gain in 38 hours.

I checked the forecast while we were driving back to camp. Rain was supposed to set in overnight and continue through most of the next day, our last day out. I suspected I wasn't the only one who'd want to call it early. I didn’t want to spend another wet night out, and then have to pack up a wet campsite in the morning.

Driving into camp, we were greeted by the rainbow below.

Back at camp, I chatted with Cassidy and Elliott about the weather, and we brought it to the group. After some hesitation, we did agree to leave before the rain set in. With scattered showers already falling, we broke camp, intending to stop somewhere dry to make food on the way back to Fairbanks.

This wasn't the end of a long day; it was the end of the trip. I was sad to be on our way home, but simultaneously relieved. And excited to shower. Looking back, the days all fold into each other, the same way the three hikes folded into one. Turbulence and all, I'd do the whole thing again. And we will. And we'll be out here together soon.

I woke up after my first night in Hatcher, somewhat well-rested. I don’t know… I don’t really sleep much. Someday that’s going to catch up to me, right? The night before was kind of perfect: a relaxing walk with Cassidy and Astra in the mountains, lots of wildflowers to photograph, a fantastic sunset. Then I unzipped the tent to this.

I ate a minimal breakfast. Most of this trip I had been struggling with a lack of appetite, something that has been happening with me hiking and backpacking the last few years. I don’t know quite how to describe the feeling. Something like: a feeling close to melancholy, but at the same time relaxed and calm. It might have something to do with my brain calming down a bit when outdoors. Regardless, I snacked on some granola and cashews before the group left to climb for the morning.

It was a short walk beyond Archangel Creek to their first climb, Captain Jack, a V4. The ‘kids’ went through the pre-climb routine that they’ve been doing for years before getting on the rock. I’m glad we’ve spent so much time stressing the importance of warming up properly for injury prevention. It’s something I don’t see many other climbers doing while I’ve been working at the climbing gym

After an hour or so, the group moved up the hill a little to try another route that we had gotten on last year. It was nice hanging out in the sun. I snacked some more and took more photos of the kids climbing for a while. There was some sadness in the back of my chest that I wasn’t climbing, even though I simultaneously didn’t really want to climb.

Cassidy and I had plans to hike, though. No what or where yet, just somewhere in the area. While they climbed, I spent some time on the GPS looking for something interesting nearby. We chatted for a bit and decided to explore uphill from where the group was climbing. From the USGS topo, it looked like there might be a pass we could use to cross over and drop into the adjacent Fairangel Valley, which could make for an interesting loop back to camp.

We planned with the group to possibly meet up in Fairangel Valley, where there were some climbs near where Cassidy and I had walked the previous night. We said goodbye and started up the talus slope.

Cassidy led the way. It was steep. Way steeper than it looked from below. Half the time it felt as if I was looking straight up at her.

Passing some old mines and mining equipment, we made a detour to scramble up into a rocky slab side valley. We didn’t get too far up before deciding the risk wasn’t worth the reward and continued up the talus sidehill a little further. It wasn’t long before we found a more agreeable path with less mangling potential.

I had some concern for the clouds that were building over the mountains to the north and east. It looked dark in places, darker than a shower. The forecast had showers later in the day, but maybe they’d be coming early.

We stopped to talk before going the last bit. Partially wondering if we were just going to hit a false ‘summit’ that keeps going, or maybe the terrain would just drop off a cliff. We had no idea. Cassidy led us over. Pardon my language in the video below, but I was out of breath, and the view was…

We had a decision to make, whether to attempt the descent that we knew nothing about and complete a loop, or to turn back the way we came. The sky told us that rain was inevitable. It would suck to get halfway down and need to climb back up in the rain. We stopped to rest anyway, so I scouted ahead to a small ledge to get a better view of what was beneath us.

We regrouped and talked it over. The pull of adventure into something new was outweighing the hesitation in both of us. So we went for it.

The rain became heavy when we hit the talus field below. The rock was slick, and navigation was tricky as the blocks were enormous and moss-covered. Eventually, we decided to try to sit it out for a bit. I’m not sure how long we stayed under the rock talking about all sorts of things, including the giant bolted boulder just up the snow from us

The rain tricked us. It let up a bit and looked like it was clearing. But we waited too long, and the downpour restarted. It was time to leave our shelter. I didn’t take any more photos for the rest of the day because I had to throw my camera in my pack, and it was raining too hard to use my phone.

Once out of the talus, we were able to return roughly on the path we had taken the day before. When we made it back to camp, the rest of the group was there, pads under the rainfly as they were trying to set up a second fly.

We both changed and dried off before the group got together to make dinner and play games under a tarp.

It was only about a 2.5-mile hike, with 1500 feet of elevation gain in the first mile. But the whole thing took us about 4 hours. We never knew what we were doing or where we were going, and it turned out to be one of the best day hikes I've ever done.

Mid-September. The days get shorter. For once, almost a normal length before they disappear for winter. A week before the Equinox Marathon, I went hiking in the Alaska Range. It was a late start for me, getting to the Gulkana Glacier parking area around 2 pm. That only gave me about six hours before sunset. On the one hand, I’m a fast hiker and can run when I need to. On the other hand, I tend to take a lot of photos.

I had only been to College Glacier one other time in 2019, spending a few days there on a backpacking trip. This time, late in the season, I hoped to get as far up the ice as I safely could before hitting the snowline.

It seemed like decent marathon training too, which I needed. I'd barely run in the month leading up to it.

I made excellent time, about two hours to the glacier terminus, six miles from where I parked. It may not seem very fast, but the terrain is rocky and quite steep in places.

Once I was up on the ice, a bit of sunlight started to punch through the clouds and patches of blue sky appeared. I would stop to take photos and video, then run further up the glacier. Repeat.

As I got higher on the glacier than I had been before, lots of moulins started to appear, even in the moraine. Lines of moulins could be seen dotting their way all the way up to the glacier margin. These often form where a supraglacial stream pours into a crevasse. As the ice flows on, the crevasse closes, but the running water melts the shaft open faster than the ice can seal it, leaving a moulin behind. The video below shows one of these lines of moulins.

Further up the glacier, I hit the boulderer’s motherlode. Along the moraine were three enormous moraine boulders (and future glacier erratics). At the time, I was climbing a lot, and these looked to be some of the best rock I’ve seen in Alaska. I spent the better part of an hour (really eating into my daylight), running around like an idiot, feeling holds, trying to estimate how many routes each boulder may have on them. And taking lots of photos and video.

It was going on 5:30 pm, and I was legitimately getting a little worried about making it back before dark. But also, the evening light was starting to shine on the peaks up in the cirque. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to photograph this area in that kind of light, so I continued onward.

Soon I was in fresh snow from the night before, but still hadn't reached the seasonal snowline, so crevasses and moulins were still visible. The light was getting better. I kept going.

Once the light hit the mountains, I spent another 15 minutes high up in the cirque taking photos before literally taking off running down the glacier. I stopped briefly at the boulders on the way down, now that I could see them in the light (while it lasted).

The sun dipped in and out of the mountains as I hiked out, making for some gorgeous light in the College Creek Valley.

I still had over a mile of road to walk out from the bridge (my car doesn't have the clearance for the lower road). But it turned out for the best because while walking out the road, I saw my first aurora of the season. Couldn’t have been a better end to the day.

It was almost the end of her over-two-week-long visit. Every time I thought about it, I got a little choked up.

For CJ’s finale adventure, we were off to Denali National Park. This was actually our second stop in the park; we'd spent a night here on the way back from Seward the previous week. It was rainy then, but the foliage was starting to turn, and we did see a little wildlife that evening.

This time we planned on staying another night at the Riley Creek Campground near the park entrance, and taking the shuttle to the Igloo Creek area the next day. We were going to hike a ridge that skirts close to the permanently closed Sable Pass wildlife area.

I spent an inordinate amount of time the night before we left mapping the closure area on my GPS so that we’d be sure not to cross into it. As I’m writing this, I managed to find an ArcGIS polygon that would have saved me a lot of time and trouble. Not only that, but looking at it, I’ve found that we weren’t even as close to the boundary as I thought we’d be, and that we never got within a quarter of a mile of it.

I'll be deliberately vague about the exact route here. I have an Alaska Hiking Guide on my site that I stopped adding to a few years ago. I've been wrestling with what it means to point people at places I love. I'm working through where I've landed in a post coming soon; for now, the short version is that I care a lot about how these places get shared.

The evening we arrived, after setting up camp, we drove into the park to the Savage River. Mostly to look for wildlife again. This turned out to be one of the most scenic trips through this area of the park for me, with nearly non-stop sightings of bull moose.

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I’ve given up all hope of keeping posts in order at this point. So here we go into another post from last summer with CJ.

I recently wrote about visiting this cave with , a little over a month ago, though we couldn't get in. We were also there with Elliott and Sam over the winter, where we saw some absolutely incredible frost and ice spike formations. It’s also a cave I’ve been visiting for about five years now. I wrote all about that in my post from our trip in June: Three Days in the Alaska Range: Day 2, Canwell Glacier Caves.

I highly recommend you check out that last article if you haven’t read it already. I provide a lot of insight into these caves and their rapid disappearance. I’m taking a slightly different direction with this post because during this visit, it was the most beautiful it has ever been, and it likely won’t survive this summer.

Sometimes I just want to pay attention to how pretty everything is.

Let’s start with the drive down.

It was early September, and the fall foliage across the tundra was near its peak. No threat of rain that day, like we had most of the rest of CJ’s visit. Just really pretty colors and some serious wind in the Delta River Valley.

CJ knows by now that when she hikes with me, we’re usually getting wet right off the bat. This trip was no different.

These caves look almost dreary and desolate from the outside. Gray talus and silt everywhere. No sign of life. Little bits of white or blue ice shining through, mostly covered in shadow. But once you step inside, it’s an entirely different world.

I’ve been wanting to bring CJ out to these caves since I first started visiting them about six years ago. I first took her out to the Canwell Glacier in 2014, but we hiked further up the glacier, skipping the lower moraine. That was early in the era of me making her ford streams on every hike, and she was still skeptical of the practice.

The timing was incredible. Twelve years of me dragging her across streams, and she finally got here in the one season the cave was at its best. The stream was taking a drastically different path than it was when Cassidy and I visited this year, so there was no issue getting in. It actually flowed from the “rear” entrance and then into the short passage that had all the ice crystals last winter.

There was a lot of water coming through, as you can see in the video above. Good thing, too. The way Cassidy and I tried in June wouldn't have been an option at all. The blue glow was stunning with the sun shining bright outside the cave.

After an hour and a half of looking at ice and rocks, we decided there was enough time to walk a little more up the moraine to see what else we could find. We only made it about 0.2 miles before we found an absolutely enormous section of collapsed ice.

It turns out this was “Big Cave”, which I detailed in my cave article from earlier this year, back when you could still walk into it. If you want to understand how fast these systems are disappearing, and why this one won't last, that post is where I get into the glaciology.

I got sad toward the end of this day. CJ’s trip was coming to an end, and she’d be flying home to New Hampshire soon. Leaving the caves, knowing that this was the last time we’d be together in the Deltas this year, not knowing how long it would be before we’d see each other again, kept me quieter on the return walk. Twenty-two years into our friendship, ridiculous banter and dead silence are about equally good with her.

If you’ve been following me, you know I’ve fallen behind on writing and photos over the last couple of years. This post is the first of four backlogged posts from the end of last summer, the first three with CJ, my best friend from New Hampshire.

I’ve held back on sharing lots of photos while waiting to write these posts, so these are all going to be media-rich. Even for me.

This one is a little different. Rather than adventuring, we spent the day on a boat in Resurrection Bay and Aialik Bay out of Seward for some more relaxing glacier and wildlife viewing. This was a good break considering we had just hiked the Harding Icefield and then some the day before. I was feeling it after 12 miles and about 4000 feet in elevation gain.

While I do enjoy these day boat tours every few years as they are a great way to see wildlife and some of our many tidewater glaciers without much time commitment, my social anxiety is at its peak. At least it is when I first step on the boat. Once we’re moving and we start seeing wildlife or ice, it tends to mellow out. It’s a very different mental experience from hiking or backpacking.

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After relaxing a bit in Homer and Seward, our days were about to get a lot more hectic. Planning to meet most of the team at the Gold Mint Campground at 3 pm, Cassidy, Elliott, and I were going to hike some of the Gold Mint Trail beforehand. But it took us a while to get ready and get there, so we ended up not being able to walk very far.

We had a much smaller group this year compared to last because so many families were vacationing or doing their own thing for July 4th. It was actually only the “kids” who recently graduated and are all heading off to college in a couple of months. Rather than camp at Gold Mint Campground, we headed into Archangel Valley to see if we could find a quieter and prettier place to stay. It paid off.

After setting up camp, we wandered down across Archangel Creek so the group could work on a boulder problem called Straighten Up and Fly Right, a V6 with a V3 stand start.

Cassidy and I both aren’t climbing at the moment, a combination of injury-related issues and, for me, low motivation to climb. But we helped everyone set up a landing zone with crash pads and gave a lesson on spotting safety.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my struggle with depression and anxiety. Last year, I used the Hatcher Trip and climbing as a means of coping with some of my anxiety, or, I guess, redirecting it. This year has been a bit different.

I struggled hard over the winter this year with depression. It’s one of the main reasons that I was unable to keep up with my writing and photography. After work at the gym, I just didn’t have any mental energy remaining.

I’m not sure how much of the winter depression was internal or how much was seasonal affective disorder. But I know the weather didn’t help. Last winter was the coldest on record, and that’s saying a lot for a place like Fairbanks.

… the average temperature in Fairbanks from December to March was almost 14 degrees below zero [F]

Between long extreme cold spells, we’d occasionally get small respites to get dumped on with record amounts of snow.

This, combined with very long workweeks, was kind of a recipe for disaster for me, mentally. It was almost impossible for me to get outside at all.

Then, just as things were starting to warm up outside, I was in Bend, Oregon, coaching the team for USA Climbing Regionals. Some of us went to climb on the comp routes the day after, and at the end of the session, I tore a groin muscle.

This took me out of commission for a few weeks. The weather was changing, but running and climbing had to be put on hold.

I did start climbing again, but not with much enthusiasm. I want to be outside exploring, photographing, and climbing, but climbing puts too much focus on a singular, isolated location. One boulder or rock.

This thought was causing me a lot of anxiety over the Hatcher trip. I’ve only been to the area twice, and I haven’t felt like I’ve ever seen it because I’ve never had the time to look up at what’s around me. I had spent about five or six days there in total previously, but hardly had a single landscape photo of the place.

This was actually the reason Cassidy, Elliott, and I decided to head down early so we could spend some time hiking and backpacking before the team got there. So, it was kind of unfortunate that we were totally rained out, but at least we had a great few days in Homer and Seward, even if it wasn’t the plan.

I remember feeling sad when they started climbing. Not really because I wasn’t climbing, though. I can’t really place my finger on it. I left to go for a walk up the valley along Fairangel Creek to follow the evening light on the hills.

I wasn’t gone for too long before I saw Cassidy and Astra following me up the valley. I stopped so they could catch up. We chatted briefly, and she seemed surprised I had never been up here before or seen the pond higher up in the valley, so we wandered up in that direction. Fitting, since we had explored an alpine pond I had visited many years prior, just a few weeks earlier.

At the pond, “disaster” struck for Astra, who fell in near the ice at the shore edge. She was in no real danger, but she definitely thought this was the end. We had a good laugh at her expense, and only felt a little bad about it.

It had been close to two hours, and the Sun had dipped behind the mountains since we left the group. I was a little surprised to see that they were still climbing, and that another Fairbanks climber from our gym had shown up and was working the same route.

After the pads were packed up, we headed back up to camp and made dinner before sleep. Astra made a spot for herself near the cars and didn’t budge.

The last thing I saw before going to sleep was the sunset over the Archangel and Fairangel Valleys, and it had to be one of the prettiest sunsets I’ve ever seen. Our first day had been a very different Hatcher experience than I’ve had in the past, but it may have also been one of the best.

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I’ve never hiked the Harding Icefield Trail in good weather. Neither Cassidy nor Elliott had hiked it at all. So when a window opened in the forecast, we left Homer for Seward.

Arriving in the late afternoon, we stopped at the Exit Glacier Campground to find a spot and set up our tents before heading back into town. We spent some time at the Alaska SeaLife Center, for me mostly an excuse to watch the seals and puffins.

Cassidy had more homework to work on, so Elliott and I went to the Seward Brewing Company for dinner. I’m not sure I’ve ever written about a dining experience, but this one warrants it. I visited the brewery last September with CJ when we hiked the Harding Icefield Trail, but we didn’t get food here. I remember seeing their pizzas coming out and kind of regretting not eating there.

We ordered their Tuscan Raider with pecorino crème fraîche, mozzarella, leek, tomatoes, rosemary, olive oil, and pistachio. I’ve eaten a lot of pizza in my life, but this might be the best one I’ve ever had. The crust was perfect, and the flavor combination was amazing. Ten out of ten, I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Seward.

Still with some time, the two of us wandered the docks and stumbled on some Steller sea lions devouring fish carcasses while the gulls tried to pick off any scraps they could. It was fun to watch as they were really going at it for a long time.

Elliott and I took Astra for a walk while Cassidy finished up the last of her homework, then drove back to the campground, arriving a little after midnight.

We struck camp as soon as we woke, then made breakfast and coffee at the campground’s cooking shelter. Getting to the trailhead early meant none of the parking trouble I’d had with CJ the previous summer, and we were on the trail before 9:30.

Arriving earlier in the season meant many more wildflowers along the first mile. Many of these I’ll need to write up in my Alaska Wildflower Guide soon.

I didn’t take many landscapes at the start of the trail because I was always looking down for flowers. There aren’t a lot of clearings down low anyway, mostly wandering through forest up steep switchbacks, only getting a few glimpses of Exit Glacier and the surrounding mountains through the trees.

After a steep climb, the first sweeping vistas of Exit Glacier appear.

Knowing that he still had a lot of climbing and hiking to do in the coming days, Elliott decided it would be wise to turn around at the first clearing. Cassidy and I were going to push to the top of the trail, especially with the weather as good as it was.

We were in the snow almost immediately after Elliott parted. The other times I’ve hiked the trail much later in the season, the remaining snowpack was much higher, beyond the steeper terrain. But the snow was firm; I only postholed once or twice over the entire 2 miles or so one-way, so the hiking was easy. Well. Relatively easy. This trail is steep.

We hiked fast through the last rolling section of rock and snow, opting to glissade through a downhill section and passing a few larger groups. There were significantly fewer people up here than lower on the trail, but it still felt like a lot compared to most places I hike in Alaska.

Approaching the overlook over the Harding Icefield, there was still blue sky, but some clouds were starting to close in. Still, this was the clearest view I’ve ever had of the icefield, looking across the nunataks in the distance. Most of the icefield was still covered in snow, ice only visible in a couple of crevassed areas.

Cassidy’s reaction at the top was the same pull I always feel up here — just drawn to keep going. She suggested walking a little further beyond the end of the trail, the only downside being that we’d have to hike back up. But we went. Taking a little break, we both spent time photographing some of the alpine flowers and the Icefield and glacier. The clouds took hold a little more, but I only noticed when we started getting a little sideways mist.

The mist turned to fog, and the drops got heavier, so it was time to head back. We moved faster, now that the majority of walking was downhill, only stopping briefly at the trail shelter, which we were disappointed to find locked.

We glissaded every chance we got on the way down, which turned out to be a lot. Eventually, Cassidy’s butt started to hurt, and I was soaking wet, so we did the last few snow descents on foot.

Whatever rain hit us at the end of the trail never reached these lower elevations, so it got hot again in the sunlight. The trip down was quick and uneventful, but very crowded. Once we hit the lower portion of the trail, it seemed like the stream of traffic in both directions was constant. Not really my cup of tea, but at least it was short-lived.

Another bittersweet end to a trip, as this marked our last day on the Kenai Peninsula before meeting up with the team kids in Hatcher. I don’t think I could have asked for a better one with my first clear views of the icefield and good company.

Cassidy, Elliott, and I planned to spend a couple of days backpacking at Hatcher Pass before the climbing team came down for our annual climbing trip. We spent one very wet night at the Gold Mint Campground, checked the forecast that looked unchanging for our planned time, and decided maybe this wasn’t really what we wanted to be doing. We decided to do some checking around to see if there were any better options.

Fairbanks: rain. Denali: rain. Deltas: rain. Valdez: rain. Seward: less rain (weird). Homer: sunny.

We drove to Homer.

I’ve only been there once before, and it was many years ago. We nabbed a nice campsite on the beach at Anchor Point, just a little outside of Homer, and were rewarded with some incredibly memorable sunsets. This time of year, the sun sets straight across Cook Inlet, dropping behind the volcanoes on the far side.

Cassidy got some homework done, I took copious photos of sunsets and eagles, the three of us did some tidepooling, and we all got playtime with Astra, their dog, on the beach.

I loved watching the bald eagles on the beach at low tide. They’d space themselves out along the waterline, hundreds of meters apart, like sentinels. I sat on the beach and watched one for a long time through the telephoto.

And the flowers!

The campground and beach were covered in Nootka lupines, arctic starflowers, seaside pea, woolly cranesbill, and rice root. It was really nice to see a few flowers that we don’t get up in the interior.

I’m hoping this trip may be the kick in the ass I need to get back to work on my Alaska Wildflower Guide. My output cratered after I took over managing the climbing gym, and I’ve built up a backlog of photographed and identified flowers waiting to be written up. Fifty-six of them. At roughly eight hours of research and writing each, that’s about eleven weeks of full-time work.

If you’ve used the guide, you may have noticed I pulled all the ads from my site last month. They were wrecking the experience, and I’m not here to make clickbait. It also cut my revenue sharply. On top of that, AI search summaries now pull text and photos straight from the guide, and while they usually link back, they’ve cut the number of people who actually visit.

So I’m leaning on direct support to keep it going. If the guide has been useful to you, a paid Substack subscription or a one-time tip on Ko-fi genuinely helps me keep writing it. It’s just me, researching, writing, and paying for the whole thing.

The sun set over Kachemak Bay a little after 11 that evening. Prints run up to 40 inches wide, on paper, metal, or acrylic. Metal holds the light in a sunset like this one.

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Our last day to do something outside before heading back to town, and the weather was finally changing. We didn’t quite know what to do with our limited time, with rain falling in some areas of the range. We landed on heading to an alpine pond near the start of the Castner-Fels Divide that I had visited ten years ago.

I didn’t exactly remember how I got there then. Actually, that was another day without a plan. I had been wandering around Fairbanks, taking photos at Creamer’s Field, and just decided to drive to the Deltas. I wandered out of the car, I think along Lower Miller Creek, and walked up the hill on a whim, just kind of fumbling onto the pond.

Rather than look for details on how to get there, we decided to totally wing it and do our own thing, starting out along Castner Creek. We walked along the trail for, ohhhhh, let’s say a kilometer. I have no idea, because I didn’t start tracking on my InReach or my watch. I also didn’t take many photos because we were down in the trees and the light was flat.

I’m writing this post exactly one month after the hike, so I’m digging through my photos, mapping software, and my poor memory to recall distance and timing. And I’m a little stunned to see that from where we left the trail, in another creek drainage, to the edge of the pond was less than one kilometer (882 meters) the way the crow flies. It took us about an hour.

The moment we left the creekbed, there was nothing but thick alders and steep ups and downs. Every step involved crouching under, squeezing through, or swimming over branches. Every time we hit the top of a hill, we’d look down a steep valley where it would be easy to throw a rock across, and a hundred meters to walk it.

I don’t remember how many times that happened. We did stumble on some cool boulders along the way. Nothing of climbing quality, but close enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to find some in the area.

When we finally made it to a clearing and a sandy beach on the edge of the pond, we stopped to eat. It started drizzling, but never quite rained.

I didn’t see any sign that people had been up here in a while. Just a lot of moose prints and some social/animal trails. After packing up on the beach, we hiked up to a small rocky ridge overlooking the pond, where the whole Delta River valley opened up below us, braided channels and ponds running off toward the range.

We spent some time sitting on the ridge and looking at the prickly saxifrage blooming below the rocks. After wandering for a bit, we spotted another way down to Lower Miller Creek that looked better than bushwhacking through alders.

The trip back to the car via Lower Miller Creek and the Richardson Highway was uneventful, but nice. The whole weekend was full of good conversation and a lot of joking. We found more wildflowers on the way out, and the drizzle mostly stopped.

While we were up on the ridge, I’d stopped to repeat a photo I remembered taking ten years ago. The first image below was from our trip; the second was taken almost exactly 10 years ago.

Surprisingly little has changed in that time. The snarled spruce has lost a few branches. Some things last.

Ten years ago, I stumbled on this pond alone. This time I brought a friend. Same pond, same snarled spruce, but the day was better for having someone to share the alders and the azaleas with. The pond’s the same, but I’m not. I think for the better.

Cassidy stands near an entrance to a large glacier cave at the Canwell Glacier terminus | Prints and Wall Art

These caves are running out of time. Every year, I follow the trail of dead ice farther up the valley. Each one I find is gone in a handful of seasons. I go looking for these caves anyway. The ground is an unforgiving devourer of shoes. Every small rise brings me to more that look exactly the same.

This time I was with Cassidy, and we were attempting to return to the cave we had visited in winter and that CJ and I had explored the summer before. It’s likely the same cave I brought some of the climbing team kids to in 2023, though back then it had barely melted out at all, more a deep overhang than a cave. Only later, digging back through my archives and GPS tracks, did I realize I’d first photographed this spot in 2021 — when it was barely a dent in the ice wall.

I watched this go from a large ice wall to a nearly collapsed cave in five years.

We came back in June and couldn’t get in. A fast, heavy channel had taken the whole entrance. The only way around was to climb a steep back slope, and a thin ice shelf hung over the stream where we’d have crossed. I wasn’t going to trust my weight to it.

We did reach a small overhang beside the main cave, clear ice full of inclusions, and a new opening starting to form nearby. I’ll go back later in the season to see whether the main cave has collapsed.

Farther up, we passed another cave CJ and I had explored. It had collapsed sometime last summer, house-sized blocks of ice slumped across the entrance, a meltwater stream running in front of it. It looked much as it had last August, the blocks only slightly smaller. A single small opening was still accessible on the far right.

The scalloped walls in the back of the cave deepened into rows of deep pockets; the climber in me would liken them to huecos. Ice-cave scallops form when turbulent air moves over the walls. It’s counterintuitive: you’d expect the airflow to slow in the hollows and smooth them out, but turbulent flow over a bump shifts the strongest scouring just upstream of each crest, so the dimples deepen instead of filling in (Fowler, 2025). It’s the same instability that builds dunes in sand.

Cassidy was more than game to keep exploring up the glacier. It’s one of the many things I like about hiking with her, always happy chasing something interesting. Traversing to the lateral moraine made for easier hiking than the up-and-down, slidey mess of the central terminal moraine. It also gave us a clear view up to Institute Peak, snow-covered at the head of the Canwell. It wasn’t long before we spotted another large hole in the moraine.

This channel formed a multi-layered tube, with the entrance leading us to the upper level. From the front (downglacier) entrance, we could walk slightly down to a lower level. Looking down, we could hear the roar of water from a deep crack beneath us. It was foreboding, wanting to push further, but there was a limit to how far we’d go, given the consequences of slipping or breaking through. We spent a while trying to reach some smaller tubes higher in the channel, one of which Cassidy dubbed the nostril. We never did find a safe way up to it, which didn’t stop us from trying for longer than we probably should have.

Because of the amount of water beneath us and our uncertainty about the stability of the ice we were on, we didn’t tempt fate by walking all the way through. Instead, we hiked around to the back side of the cave to explore the other side. We found much deeper blue ice on this up-glacier side. The layering of bubbled and clear ice was some of the best I’ve seen here, separating the much clearer deep blue windows into the ice.

These are foliated layers, not the original depositional bands. Three miles down-glacier from the accumulation area and only a few meters from the base of the glacier, this ice has been folded and sheared as it flowed, its layering transposed and recrystallized under pressure over what may be hundreds of years.

We didn’t get the loop we had hoped for; there was still too much snow in the Rainbow Basin. We turned back down the terminal moraine, a different line than we’d walked in on.

For years, I told myself I wanted to be out here alone, that the solitude was the peace of it. I’ve stopped telling myself that. What I’ve found instead is the company of people like Cassidy and CJ, who are self-sufficient, who could do all of this alone, and choose not to. We’re on the same page out here. I’d rather share these places in person now than only as photographs.

I’ve been walking these routes for about thirteen years. I’m not sure I’d recognize the place I started in. I’m not sure I’d recognize myself.

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Below the line: a much longer look at this same cave and its neighbors, going back to 2021. Footage from inside with CJ last summer, when the crawl space still ran with water. That same crawl space in winter, its ceiling grown over with frost crystals. Two caves that no longer exist at all, including the most beautiful one I’ve ever found on this glacier — the one my cover photo comes from.

Plus the physics: why glacier ice is blue (and why the two explanations you’ve probably heard are both wrong), how these caves form, and why they never last.

References

Cuffey, K. M., & Paterson, W. S. B. (2010). The physics of glaciers (4th ed.). Butterworth-Heinemann.

Fowler, A. C. (2025). The formation of cave scallops. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 481(2312), Article 20250033. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2025.0033

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Cassidy parked the car a mile from the suspension footbridge. Deep snow buried the road past that point. We still weren’t sure exactly where we were going anyway, so it didn’t matter. There were choices here, but it was obvious that the snow would decide most of it for us. Gulkana Glacier, College Glacier, the HooDoos, or head out by Gunn Creek and the Gakona?

I don’t remember exactly why we landed on Gulkana. I think we just kind of started walking that way. It was obvious along the way that College Glacier would be a no-go. Way too much isothermal snow in a narrow valley surrounded by thick vegetation. Visibility was better toward the Gulkana Glacier.

Before we made it to the bridge, we passed another hiker on his way out and stopped to chat briefly. He asked if we were mountaineering or hiking. “Just hiking for the day,” I said. He mentioned that he had just hiked up and along the moraine rib on the east side of the glacier. I confirmed with him that it was the moraine between the Gulkana and College Glacier valleys before we parted ways.

We noted his trip as an option as we continued across the bridge. It was Cassidy’s first time crossing it. It’s a big suspension bridge, and it bounces quite a bit (not at all due to me exaggerating my steps). The boards are spaced wide enough to see the creek below, or to occasionally slip a toe or heel through. Good fun.

Once across the bridge, we attempted to stay near the trail. Deep snow led to some bushwhacking through somewhat sparse alder and willows. As we slowly worked to the end of the vegetation, we spotted a big boulder with a few climbs on it and wandered over. I’d looked at it once years ago, climbed a couple of easy things, but never brought a pad out.

Continuing up to the divide, the view of the valley opened up in every direction. Summit Lake, further south, was mostly still frozen. The Gulkana valley and upper College Creek were buried in snow. We walked further along this high moraine than I had gone before.

Somewhere along the way, I felt myself finally relax. I often carry a lot of tension, mainly from work, but also from the constant hum of anxiety. Being outdoors helps, but often takes a while to sink in. I remember the relief hitting like a flood, and the tension never came back for the rest of the trip.

Multiple times we pushed a little further, just to the next big rock, or to see a bit more of the view ahead. We finally turned around at a distant vantage on the Gulkana Glacier and the Gabriel Icefall.

The freshly melted-out moraine showed signs of life among the dark talus. Purple mountain saxifrage (Saxifraga oppositifolia ssp. oppositifolia) poked through the dark talus in a few spots.

On the return trip, we finalized our decision to head to Red Rock Canyon to camp for the night and look for glacier caves the next day. We took a slightly different route down, fumbling through alders into the College creekbed and following it back to the bridge. We were at the car by about 7.

The road through Red Rock Canyon was completely snow free. That surprised me. We’d seen deep snow in the Rainbow Basin from the Richardson, and the Gulkana road had been buried that morning. I expected more of the same here. But, greenup was happening in the valley, and when we got to our camp, there were lots of flowers blooming.

After setting up camp, we got to making food. I had a rather flavorless Mountain House chicken fried rice. It was fine. While it was rehydrating, I photographed some of the eightpetal mountain avens (Dryas octopetala) near our cooking area.

It was getting late and the golden “hour” (lasts much of the night this time of the year) was setting in. At about 11 pm, we decided to walk further up the road to see what the conditions were like and get a better view of the Canwell Glacier valley so we’d be prepared for the next day. The stream crossing was just a trickle, lower than I’d ever seen it. Odd, with how much snowmelt was running everywhere else.

Once the Jeep trail climbed out of the lower valley, we started hitting some snowpack, so we walked along a soft footpath instead. Along the way we kicked up a couple of ptarmigan that likely tried to distract us from a nearby nest. I think we hiked out for just under an hour before turning around after getting a good view of Institute Peak.

Getting back to camp a little after midnight, we stayed up chatting for a while before making a morning plan and heading to bed. It had been a long time since a day unwound me like that one had. Tomorrow we’d go looking for ice.

Browse the full gallery from the day on my site here.

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In early June, five of us took off for Nome Creek for an overnight trip to Mt. Prindle in the White Mountain National Recreation Area. The plan was to head to Mt. Prindle at some point, but with it being so early in the season after an insanely cold and snowy winter, it was as much a recon trip as anything.

Getting an earlyish start (we tried) on Saturday and driving up the Steese Highway to US Creek Road, we hit the trailhead at about 12:45 pm and found the most cars in the parking area I’ve ever seen. In the grand scheme of things, it was seven cars, but it felt like so many. My antisocial brain immediately starts a countdown. Seven potential parties out there that I can tick off my list as we pass them on the way in.

The hike starts with multiple water crossings right off the bat: first Nome Creek, then a big tributary almost immediately after. We had a fair amount of snow early on too, although it was firm enough to walk on the surface, breaking through only at the margins. I noticed one woman from the parking lot hiking off a hill in another direction. Down to six remaining parties.

The trail was the normal early-season wet mess, making it necessary to walk through the brush to the side of the trail about three-quarters of the time. Things were just starting to turn green, but only a few wildflower species were poking through. We passed a man walking the other way who warned us there was a lot of snow and mud on the trail. Not long after, another couple heading out as well. Only four parties remained.

Besides wet and muddy terrain, we had to navigate some long stretches of snowpack. Most of the time this went fairly well with a firm surface, but every once in a while we’d find soft spots and punch down to our knees or lower. In a few places the snow was a boon, letting us cross sections of willow and alder thicket right on top.

We passed another couple of hikers between miles 3 and 4, putting the remaining party count down to three. In the distance, across the creek, there was another group of hikers with dogs resting in a rocky area. We followed up the valley in their general direction, angling uphill to avoid snow and mud down at trail level, stopping at a point adjacent to the other hikers to rest, eat, drink some water, and look at flowers.

As we rested, the group took up my counting bit and started debating whether the party across the way had come in two cars or three. We landed on three, which zeroed out the lot: no one else unaccounted for on the trail. We granted that six people and two dogs could theoretically fit in two cars, but agreed it was unlikely.

The other party started setting up camp where they’d stopped, and it was time for us to keep moving. We’d already decided to glissade down the snow slope to the trail. Everyone else pulled on rain gear before dropping in, so I just went for it. The others followed, repeatedly attacked by Astra the whole way down.

We were nearing the point where the trail turns into a marshland, which is the headwaters of Nome Creek. We started looking for a dry, ideally rocky, spot to camp. Heading further up the trail, crossing a few more snowfields, we spotted a flat patch across the creek that looked like a promising camp in the alpine tundra.

It looked like a great spot. Good views up and down the valley, the small tors on the ridge ahead that would eventually lead us to the Windchimes and beyond, and rock outcroppings up above. About 100 yards off we spotted a boulder that would make a good kitchen, far enough to keep our food away from camp. We settled in and started setting up tents.

It quickly became apparent that our spot was a bit of a wind funnel in the valley. Cassidy and Elliott got their tent set up fairly quickly, and Sam was not far behind. Jules and I were setting up our tents, both on the windward side of the group. We’d both staked out and were just starting to put on flys when a strong gust of wind caught the material, ripped the stakes out of the ground, and flipped both tents. The result was two bent poles on my tent, and a broken one on Jules’s.

Field repairs went quickly with a splint and some rebending. We moved tents closer together and stacked a few rocks to create a wind shield. Camp felt cozy.

We decided that if we were going to reach Mt. Prindle, it would have to be this night. Food came first. Some ate a full dinner before heading back out; a few had bigger snacks and planned to eat on our return. While we cooked, we watched the other big party heading up the valley. Same plan as us, apparently.

By the time we left camp, it was about 7:30 pm, and I think everyone was feeling a bit tired. Perfect timing to start the climb. We chose the snowiest, rockiest route possible, because as long as we were on snow or rock, we weren’t sinking in mud and water. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of sidehilling, which isn’t ideal for those with bad knees and ankles.

The initial climb brought us to the ridge with the tors seen from our camp below. Here we got to follow a semblance of a trail again for a while. I’m still not sure if this trail is “maintained” more by people, or Dall sheep, but it does speed up the walk up the ridge.

We stopped for a bit in the tors to catch our breath. The other group was also resting ahead of us. Elliott walked down to ask them if their dogs were friendly with other dogs before letting Astra loose. It was clear she was also getting tired, as it took her a while to even realize there were other dogs. Once she noticed, she got some good play in and probably wore herself out the rest of the way.

We decided not to carry on all the way to the summit of Mt. Prindle. It was too far to go in the evening given everyone’s energy level. We would go the additional mile out to the Windchimes, a much larger set of granite outcrops, and spend a little time exploring there before turning back.

This turned out to be a wise choice. Cresting the rib of a ridge between these lower tors and the Windchimes involved some uncomfortable postholing in between loose sections of talus that were fine for the humans, but a little precarious for the doggo.

Once we hit our high point for the day, the full sweep of the Windchimes and the ridge to the Prindle summit opened up. It was getting close to 9 pm, the sun low and raking across the hills. To the north, it caught the water running through another valley, below an endless sea of tor-dotted ridges.

We picked our way through the tors until the snow gave us an obvious turnaround, then stopped at one of the largest outcrops on the ridge to rest. The wind was running cold enough that we didn’t linger as long as we wanted to.

Leaving was bittersweet. I had an urge to push on, but everyone was tired, myself included, and I was starting to get hungry. Our “recon” trip turned out better than we had hoped and the return hike gave us the best light of the day.

Back at camp we made dinner and complained about Mountain House portions. They used to run around 1,000 calories; now they’re closer to 500 or 600, which is useless for backpackers who actually need the calories. Shrinkflation, or marketing to a different customer, I’m not sure. At least the price is about double what I used to pay.

After our 11 pm dinner, we packed up our food and stoves and stashed the bear canisters by our kitchen boulder. I wandered a bit down the hill from the tent and found a place to sit and watch the colors on the clouds over the valley below until just after midnight.

A little rain fell in the morning before we all got up. I didn’t sleep great, and from the sound of it, most of the group didn’t either. We made breakfast in the cold, Cassidy and I drank coffee, which for me is the most important part of the day.

Striking camp went quick. Cassidy thought she might have dropped her sunglasses the day before, near the creek crossing, so we kept an eye out. I lucked out and spotted them hanging on some dwarf birch on the opposite side near the spot we crossed.

The sky was a bit dreary compared to the day before. The chance of rain seemed high, so we moved quickly down the valley with fewer stops. Somehow, on the way in, we had completely missed a stretch of alder thicket that is always a royal pain on this hike. We had no such luck on the way out, and got a little separated in the mess of it.

We were back at the trailhead about the same time we’d arrived the day before. We never reached the summit, but that wasn’t really the point. The mountain will be there when the snow’s gone, and so, I expect, will the people I’d want to go back with.

Check out the full gallery from this trip on my site here

In late May, I spent a couple of days at the Chena River State Recreation Area with Cassidy, Chenoa, and their dogs. I guess it was closer to a day. We left after a full Friday of route-setting, forerunning, and Team practice (basically an 11-hour workday), stopping at home just long enough to pack. The plan was for a sort of whirlwind trip anyway.

We drove out to Chena Hot Springs. I took my first photos of the evening at about 11:30 pm, so we had camp set up and a fire going by then. While collecting firewood, I found a single flowering dwarf marsh violet (Viola epipsiloides) near the river.

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Before turning in, we all walked down the road to another gravel pullout and trail. It was nearly 3 am by the time we went to bed. The plan was to wake up around 8 and hike as far as we could on the Granite Tors Trail, as the snow conditions would allow. We had to be back on the road by 3:30 or 4:00, though. Chenoa had an event in town, and Cassidy had to close the gym.

It was 10 am by the time we had breakfasted, struck camp, and hit the trail. There were scattered showers in the forecast, but the weather was decent when we started. The trail starts with a grated crossing on a bridge that Cassidy’s dog, Astra, did not appreciate.

The boardwalk section of the trail went by quickly. Once we started up the hill, the trail was in good shape, and we kept a steady pace, stopping occasionally to catch our breath. The first 4 miles and 1200 feet of elevation gain were snow-free, but once the deciduous trees disappeared and the terrain opened up, we found ourselves needing to move off-trail to avoid deep snow.

In a few spots, the snow was unavoidable, postholing up to our knees or more while bushwhacking through thick brush.

After cresting the hill, the trail flattens out, just a gradual uphill for a little under a mile to the tors, but the postholing there was unavoidable. We reached the first Welcome Tor a little after our ‘scheduled’ turnaround, and stayed to play on the rocks anyway.