Backcountry Skiing..Your Winter Window Into The Chugach.
The Amphitheater Mountains lie as a unique subset of gentle peaks to the south of the Alaska Range along the eastern Denali Highway. Most of the range lies in the Tangle Lakes Archeological District managed by the BLM folks in Glennallen. The area has a few marked ATV trails to poach that make for excellent mountain biking. Tangle Lakes also […]
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Loveland Ridge on Thompson Pass offers unparalleled views of the Chugach Range for the adventurous hiker. While in winter it’s one of the best “earn your turns” runs in the world, in summer the area beckons exploration of the alpine and glacier regions. This past weekend we made an astonishing discovery on the DOT Glacier. At the time I wrote […]
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The Gulkana Glacier is one of three benchmark glaciers in the United States that the US Geological Survey have been monitoring since 1971. The “mass balance” of the Gulkana has been calculated at different times in an ongoing study about the effects of our dependence on fossil fuels and the related global warming crisis. Of course, the irony of hiking […]
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It’s not hard to recommend a Valdez favorite day hike. This past weekend was one of the best local hikes I’ve done solo as a solstice sun made a rare appearance. While I spend countless days on the summits slopes of Thompson Pass in the winter, summer brings another way to enjoy the same terrain. While most trails in Valdez […]
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Twenty years ago, Tabitha and I took our first backpacking trip together out of McCarthy. That was an arduous five-day trek to Nicolai Pass. This past weekend we returned to celebrate that trip by exploring the Root Glacier. We were greeted by a much better road that makes the drive from Valdez doable in about four hours. This would be Tabitha’s […]
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It took us a day to drive from the Nordurland to Pingvellir located in the Suderland where we planned to walk along the Western Rift Zone. Here, the giant tectonic plates of Europe and North America collide. While most of this interaction lays under the ocean, the results of pressure and movement are present at the earth’s surface in Iceland. Again, […]
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