An Ice Day For a Hike
Glaciers are crunchy.
That was my first surprise as I stepped onto Root Glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. The ice crackled like potato chips as I inched forward with crampons strapped to my hiking boots.
The next discovery was even better. The steel spikes on the crampons gripped so well I could walk up near-vertical slopes like a sticky-toed gecko. In a few minutes, I was tramping across a surreal moonscape of solid ice pocked with turquoise pools.
I dreaded crossing the melt-fed creeks that coursed across the glacier and plunged into crevasses. I didn't need a glaciologist to tell me that if I slipped, I wouldn't come out the other end for a few hundred years. "This is part of the fun!" said Mike Murphy, head of Kennicott Wilderness Guides, who led the half-day glacier hike. Mike wrestled a boulder into the stream to get me across a torrent that seemed 10 feet wide (but was surely less than half that).
I took a deep breath and jumped.
Wrangell-St. Elias is among the least visited national parks, with just 57,000 visitors in 2004. It doesn't help that it's literally at the end of the road, at best a seven-hour drive from Anchorage. But Wrangell-St. Elias may well be the most Alaskan place you'll ever see. It's America's largest national park, with 13 million acres of wilderness--an expanse larger than Switzerland. It encompasses North America's greatest collection of peaks above 16,000 feet, including 18,000-foot Mount St. Elias. There are more than 100 major glaciers, one larger than the state of Rhode Island. Its Kennecott national historic site was once the world's richest copper mine. And the park houses some of our greatest national treasures--free-thinking, cantankerous Alaskans.
The National Park Service and big tour operators plan to increase visitation to reduce crowding at Alaska's marquee park, Denali. So the state is upgrading 60-mile McCarthy Road into the park. Once billed in guidebooks as the worst road in America, it's a one-lane gravel track down the old Kennecott mine railroad bed, with spikes still surfacing to puncture tires. On the two-hour drive, my only complaint was that it was too bumpy to drink my Diet Coke.
Hoof it. The road ends in a quintessentially Alaskan way--at the Kennicott River, with the town of McCarthy and Kennecott mine on the far side. For years, the only way across was via hand-pulled tram. Residents argued fiercely over whether the tram was a threat to life or a defense against tourist-infested minivans. In 1996, they compromised with a footbridge. Shouldering my pack, I walked the half mile into town.
McCarthy, summer population perhaps 100, has a scattering of charmingly dilapidated buildings along the dirt main street. Eighty-five years ago, it was a business center catering to the thousands who came north to make a fortune, or maybe a living, mining silver, gold, and copper. After decades of decrepitude, McCarthy is growing again and delivers a range of comforts remarkable considering its location: halibut cioppino, hot showers, and Wi-Fi Internet access--even though residents must generate their own electricity or do without.
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