Our first excursion in Alaska was split into two main parts and the first of those was to visit the Mendenhall Glacier. We’ve seen glaciers before in Scandinavia and South America and they are absolutely magnificent to see even if you have to temper that excitement by realising just how much they’re contracting year after year. This world has shown that it’s not prepared to take the big steps needed to properly slow down the effects of climate change – think French Revolution, but bigger and more widespread – so targeting individuals for travelling to see these sights is absolutely the worst thing anyone could do and the sort of thing only bullies and cowards would resort to. What I’m saying here is: get out and see these things if you can and while you can, and if anyone says “Oh, you’re just contributing to the destruction of our planet” then load them up into a trebuchet and shoot them over the horizon where they may perhaps become mulch and serve a useful purpose.
Ahead of the views of the glacier, though, there was a hike to take. We are not hiking people. We’ve been on hikes and we’ve not really enjoyed the hikes. We’ve got knees and ankles and hips and backs that have firm opinions about how much exertion they’re prepared to put up with. But, we were here and no hike has killed us yet so we braced ourselves.
As it was, this particular hike – called The Trail of Time – was very gentle, largely flat, and not especially long. The reason for the name would become evident as we were guided expertly on the broadly circular route that started once we’d disembarked from the bus at a designated parking area.
It was cool, occasionally drizzly, and the guided walk featured a lot about moss. If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the different types of moss and lichen that grow in Alaskan woodland then this is the tour for you. For me it was less about the learning and more about just enjoying the look of it all. Those mossy carpets decorating the trees muffled the sounds from all directions, even muting small waterfalls where they ran alongside the hiking trail.
The Trail of Time’s name can be connected to the giant boulder markers we encountered on the walk through the trees. These boulders were inscribed by how far the glacier reached decades back and, as you’d probably expect, the oldest markers were those we first encountered with newer ones closer and closer to the end. Five minutes of walking could move you back dozens of years of glacial melt and recession. It also made the wooded area of the hike that much more interesting too, because the feel of ancient land wasn’t strictly true given how much of where we walked would have been within the extent of the glacier’s reach and covered in ice a century before.
We reached a spot on the hiking trail where we were told there was a good view of Mendenhall Glacier usually, but the weather wasn’t being too kind to us on this day, at least at this moment. Low cloud had dropped into the valley and bled all the colour and details from the sight. However, we would get more chances to see the glacier at the end of the hike and, weather being the changeable thing it is, our views of it would improve.
By the time we got around to the visitors centre and close to the lake that is one of the benefits to the local ecosystem of the glacier’s shrinkage we could see more of Mendenhall’s majesty.
Those who needed to pee got the chance to do that and when we were all ready to move on we set off for a shorter walk to where our bus would pick us up from to take us to the next part of the tour.
But there was time for a surprise – to us, at least – when someone in our group spotted a porcupine up a tree. You can just about see it resting in the crook of the branches two thirds of the way up the main trunk in the photo below. We had been told that we might see a porcupine on this hike but we hadn’t realised that they climbed trees, assuming instead that they spent their time at or maybe even below ground level. How Porcupines Live just never popped up in any school lessons for us.
In the next post in this Alaska cruise travelogue series we’ll be off on the main thing we wanted to do when visiting Alaska: spotting humpback whales. And this turned out to be spectacular!