It's taken me about a billion years to post these, but it was a pretty cool day so figure I should just get it done. I had a friend visiting from Florida over Christmas one year, what a way to get motivated to do snowy tourist things. This was on his bucket list...see a glacier. So it was off to the local small airport at Palmer to hop a flight to the Knik Glacier (and yes, in Alaska we pronounce the K, and the n, so it's K-ah-nik. It is actually pretty cool to see by air. We got a nice low aerial over pillars of ice.
The crevasses were pretty deep. I think I was surprised at how many miles of glaciers there were, and how vast it actually was.
A nice "frozen river of ice" pic backing up against the mountain.
I am always amazed at the beauty of the blue of glacial ice.
Apparently the weight of the glacier makes it so compact, so this shade of blue from the refractive light index is part of its distinctive beauty.
Obviouslyu I am a bit obsessed with this color.
Somewhere around here is when I started thinking of all the plane crash movies where people have to hike out....and realized there was no way out of the crevasse maze. We were just a few miles from civilization, but seemed like a world away.
Close up.
Yup. That would be a long impossible walk home.
So this was really interesting. I will confess how long I have failed to post. These pics are taken in December of 2018. Some of you might remember we had a little earthquake up here November 2018. November 30th, 8:29 am to be precise...yeah it was that kind of memorable. I was just logging onto a computer call, and when the painting started flying off the walls and folks started yelling, we actually ran outside from the office cubbies in the building attached to work....waited for the world to start shaking, then ran into the hospital. Ceiling tiles were downed, there was a haze that I wasn't sure was drywall dust or smoke, but it set off fire detectors all the same. The doors clean fell off the Emergency Department, and then the tsunami sirens went off. Anyway...it was a big one. When I got home 18 hrs later, the kind cat sitters had been by to right the furniture, sweep up the kitchen, because all glass in the cupboards on one wall flew out and shattered. 7.1 it registered formally. We had aftershocks that were a 5 for months. Anyway....if you look carefully, you can see part of the ice shelf of the glacier collapsed. Pilot said it was down after the quake.
Here's another shot of it.
Guess I am not sure if the strongest force is the earthquake or the glacier. It's amazing that it took a section down....but in the scope of the glacier such a small part of it.
And with that it was heading home.
Bye glacier!
One of the little black dots is a moose. I can't pick it out now either lol
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