The Toe of the Root

We got up this morning and headed over the footbridge, and caught the shuttle to Kennicott, 8 km up the road. We originally thought that the shuttle was a bit of a make-work project for the local economy, but after seeing the road, we realized why they do it. The road is 1.28 car widths wide, with a steep upslope on one side and downslope on the other. We drove by a jeep that got too close to the side and slid off the road.... yeesh. Yep; don't want too much traffic on that road.

Kennicott is an old mining down that abruptly closed in 1938. It looks like they are trying to restore it into an open-air museum. We hiked past Kennicott and headed towards the Root Glacier. I've seen and been on a number of glaciers over the years, but this one blew my mind. The terminal morraine of this glacier must have covered close to 1000 acres, by my best estimates... it looked like a lunar landscape. We hiked on the side of the valley, and made our way to the toe of the glacier, then hopped up onto it. The section we were on was dirty enough and shallow enough in slope that you didn't need crampons. Gotta love snow-free glaciers. We explored around for a while then once we got as far as we safely could, we headed back off the glacier and back to our campsite. We then packed up and started our drive towards Denali; driving back the dirt road, and stopping at a small campsite for the night.

We treated ourselves with some Alaska King Crab we bought back in Valdez.