We looked up some friends of some friends in Cordova and John was kind enough to pick us up from the airport and give us a ride to town. We stopped off at his place near the docks before lunch and dropped in on the local art group in the middle of a work session. I felt completely at home. Around a half-dozen women had spread their paints out and were all working on various projects: still lifes, portraits, landscapes. Ahhh, the smell of art in progress. Before long they had me sitting down with a glass of red wine and we were trading tips over brushes and paints and pretty much just chatting up a storm about life in Cordova and our adventures to date while the guys got a tour of the hangar and shop. It was a nice way to decompress after that last bit of scud-running over the coast.
John and his wife were headed off to Anchorage via the high-speed ferry and would be back in a few days. They were happy to loan us their truck for the night. After lunch we packed up our gear and headed out along 50 miles of dirt road back to Childs Glacier. The road wound through the Copper River delta and from this altitude we could see the river was swollen with rain and runoff from the snowfields and glaciers we’d passed earlier.
There were a few places where the road had been recently repaired and gravel levees had been built up to keep the river from washing it out again. Driving in a truck back across the river delta that afternoon the view was soooo much slower and soooo much flatter than where we’d been that morning. It took a while to adjust to the scale. The mountains seemed smaller and the view was limited by bushes and trees. But the water was right there rushing by the road. Eagles perched in trees and soared overhead. We passed an aerie in a tree that looked to be about the size of the truck we were driving. And the smell was completely different – salty coastal air mixed with mud and wet trees.
Eventually we reached a point of land just before the Million Dollar Bridge and turned off into a relatively new park at the base of the Childs Glacier.
The Childs is the fastest moving glacier in the US traveling around 500’ per year. As a result, it’s also the most actively calving glacier and folks have been visiting it for years to watch great slabs of ice crash into the river below.
After flying over and past the glaciers earlier today it was a treat to stand just a few hundred feet across the river from one. The ice was aquamarine blue – just like the pictures we grew up looking at in National Geographic – and studded with rocks and other debris pulled down off the mountains.
There was also a constant low frequency cracking and groaning coming from the ice. Every now and then a chunk would break off and tumble down a crevasse, crashing and rattling.
Once we saw a chunk hit the water, but nothing like what had been described to us by folks who’d seen some real action. Apparently when a slab of ice calves off it’ll create a little tsunami, driving water 30-50’ up the banks on the other side of the river – where we were standing – and crashing over everything in its path.
We cooked up an early dinner and packed our food in the bear-proof bins at the campground and settled down for the night. We slept lightly. There were black bear in the area, the night didn’t get quite dark, and periodically there was an earth-shuddering kaboom as giant hunks of ice calved off the glacier.
We woke early and cooked up a hot breakfast (it was chilly down here around all this ice) and sat around watching little icebergs float down the river. By little I mean about the size of the picnic table. After breakfast we packed up and headed across the Million Dollar Bridge and turned off on a track that took us down to the river. We pulled out our spinning gear and dropped a line in, hoping for a fresh Copper River salmon.
No such luck for us. Between the constant flow of ice and the density of the silt they probably couldn’t see our lures. I mean, the river’s so choked up it’s a wonder their lungs can find the oxygen.
So we fished and pondered these sorts of things and kept our eyes peeled for bears until we got cold. Then we packed back into the truck, cranked the heat up and headed back across the bridge and down the 50 miles of dirt road back to Cordova.
Our eyes had adjusted to the landscape somewhat, and on the way back we spotted lots of beavers swimming in their lagoons and working on their lodges, we also saw heron, swan and moose. We stopped to watch a moose and calf as they walked along the road. As we were debating the relative dangers of moose in general, the observed moose and calf leery of us, left the road and headed across a pond. They got a little too close to a pair of nesting swan, and what ensued was a scene straight our of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The swans started hollering at the moose, which made the moose pick up speed bringing it even closer still to the nest whereupon the swan lept up and began seriously attacking the moose. The swan beat the moose with its huge wings and that moose fled the pond at an extremely high rate of speed, little calf trailing along after.
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