It's an Exit

Today we hiked up the Harding Icefield overlook, besides the Exit Glacier. The morning started foggy and drizzly, and we dressed accordingly. As we progressed up the trail, the sky cleared and the clouds parted, and we were grossly overdressed with not a lot of options to strip down. Mercifully, it was somewhat cooler at higher elevations.

On the way up, something with the scene wasn't quite right, but I couldn't quite figure it out. Then looking at the glacier slithering its way down the lush valley, the oddity suddenly struck me: I've never looked down a green valley to see blue ice. In the Rockies, the toe of the glacier is almost always at or above treeline (at least the ones I've seen).... can anyone out there think of an exception? Well here, in coastal Alaska, even though treeline is at about 900m, the toe of exit glacier is at about 100m.

As we topped out on the trail, the immensity of the Harding Icefield became apparent. The distant Nunataks that defined the limits of what we could see were nearby blips on my topo map.... the bulk of the icefield still lay beyond. I'm sure a flightseeing tour would be needed to get a sense of scale of this place. My mind started racing with possibilities for yet another novel location for our annual winter-camping slogfest: doing some sort of traverse of this icefield would be breathtaking.