Day 41 Ends with a Glacier Hike

It was the view of Gulkana Glacier from the Denali Highway that decided our next move ... the one that would lengthen our day of exploration by three hours.

We ended up not only driving a mile further into the boonies from our site at Isabel Pass, but we then also did a three-mile hike to the glacier. Double all those distances for the return! Good thing it doesn’t get dark this time of the year.

The description I had read of the Gulkana Glacier hike said to drive the Isabel Pipeline Camp Road as far as we could, park the car, and continue on foot from there. The question was, how much further could we go? After all, we’d already driven about 1.5 miles to get to the spot where we were boondocking.

Turns out that we could have shortened the hike by driving another mile from where we decided to park the car, but the meltwater running down the road scared us off. No matter, we needed the exercise.

We walked on the rocky road best we could, staying right when the road branched off ... only because we figured the glacier was somewhere in that direction.

When we came to Phelan Creek, which headwaters at the glacier, we found the “bridge” mentioned in the description of the hike. It was a wobbly thing over a fast-flowing creek with deep, silty water. It consisted of some guy wires, braided steel handrails (if you can call them that) and unevenly spaced wooden slats. Yikes. But we managed to cross over without mishap ... whew!

Then we started climbing the hill mentioned in the description. Fighting our way through some heavy brush, that snagged on everything, we eventually found a path of sorts ... visible only by looking into the distance. All part of the adventure, right?

We didn’t make it all the way to the glacier’s terminus. For one thing, from where we stopped, the terminus was still at least two miles away. For another thing, storm clouds were gathering in the direction from which we had come. Sure, we had rain gear on, but the rocky path would be a little too slippery if we were caught in a downpour. Not to mention what the rain might do to the level of the meltwater on the road. Besides it was already 7:00p ... it had taken us nearly two hours to just get to this point.

So, we turned back. Having made note of landmarks along the way, we negotiated the path back without getting into the brush, wobbled our way across the bridge, and walked the rocky road back to where we had left the toad in record time ... one hour. Yay!

We can now add wilderness hiking to our resume!Read more