Portage Valley and the Trail of Blue Ice

Middle Glacier in Portage Valley

What an incredible find!  Without doing much research we ended up in a fantastic campsite in a fantastic location.  Just behind the Williwaw USFS Campground we got this wonderful view of Middle Glacier.  Because this is a United States Forestry Service Campground, our Golden Eagle Pass got us in for half price.  This view.... for only $9.00 a night!

Portage Creek

It was a drizzly day, but we decided to hike the Trail of Blue Ice which was just behind the campground.  It is a boardwalk/paved trail that goes along Portage Creek south of the campground and ends up at Portage Lake.

Portage Lake with Portage Glacier in the background

Over the years, Portage Glacier has advanced and retreated due to climatic changes.  It is reported that it is now receding five hundred feet a year.  Before its present retreat the indigenous peoples, early traders, and miners traveled across the Portage Glacier and the Burns Glacier (next to it) using them as a "portage" between Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet.  Today the railroad and tunnel to Whittier provide this important transportation link.

Here I am taking picture of "calves".  This is an exciting first for me!  I later learned that the Portage Glacier extended to this point in 1939, the year I was born.  The glacier has now receded so far that you can barely see it from the lake.

The Begich, Boggs Visitor Center at Portage Lake

The Visitor Center is very informative and arranged so visitors have a sense of walking up Portage Valley, through Portage Pass and down into Pince William Sound.  My favorite section in the Center is the "Alaskans and Their Stories" room, where I listened to talks about real people who lived in this area.

Just beyond the Center is a small tunnel through a section of the Chugach Mountains.

David.... ready for the  fish and the bear!

Our second day we decided to walk the trail in the opposite direction and have David try his luck fishing along the way.  The camp host warned us that there had been recent bear sightings so we both wore our "bear bells" so we would not startle any bear. We sounded a bit like Santa's reindeer as we walked along, but we rather have the bears run from us than the other way around!

I was sooooo happy to get such a great view of Explorer Glacier

I have often wondered why glacial ice is blue.  A brochure from the Visitor Center explained it well: "The ice is formed under the weight of countless snowfalls, which squeezes out most of the air, leaving dense, compact ice.  Sunlight, or white light, is made up of all the colors of the spectum... with each color having a different amount of energy.  In regular ice, like the ice in your freezer, the air bubbles scatter the light - creating the white appearance.  When sunlight strikes glacier ice, the lower energy colors are absorbed by the ice and only the blue color, which has the most energy, is reflected back to the eye." 

The blue ice of Explorer Glacier

I can't explain my excitement and my interest in glaciers... but I think it has to do with the big picture ... of creation and recreation, and life and death, and change and beauty and the eternal Mystery.