HEADLAMP: Where the Ice Converged

The mountains of Southcentral Alaska have many layers of scenery, history, and wonder. Our first experience with them is overwhelming, with peaks and glaciers so numerous that in memory the individual mountains become indistinct. As we age among the mountains, we come to know—through many years of accumulated and melted snowpacks—the wolverine that shot out of view across a particular trail one afternoon in a certain year. And, of course, the rising brush lines and disappearing glaciers whose change is so rapid that our landscape may will soon be unrecognizable to someone who could remember it from just a century ago.

We know the glaciers glaciers like our grandparents. As they age they shrink, their crevasse lines like cracked skin become more evident every year, and the moraine bands like old veins protrude from their atrophying ice. The glaciers have names: Penny Royal, Bomber, Snowbird, Jewel. Farther away, Le Compte, Muir, Shakes. At a terminal moraine 100 years ago, John Muir reached out and touched ice. Today, that is a great void as the Shakes Glacier retreats seemingly as fast as the melting snow in this season.

There is another layer to time and ice beyond anthropogenic climate change. Cook Inlet, our home, was once a startlingly different place, as the great Chugach glaciers stopped not at the Matanuska River or Lake George, but surged out to the ocean, carving broad valleys that long since have been inhabited. Those Chugach glaciers continued all the way out into what is now Cook Inlet. They represent not just inanimate ice, but are a marker of time so immense it is difficult for humans to comprehend. If we can imagine the glaciers, we can also remember farther back to the Devonian and Silurian, when the seas were hundreds of feet higher and crocodile type creatures swam in the Arctic’s warm waters. In this sense, the glaciers convey not just the power of forces that carved the land but also the incredible arc of evolution and the creatures that predated us. When this amphitheater of ours—Cook Inlet—was ice, the Matanuska and Knik glaciers met in the community known as the Butte, around a mountain we now call Matanuska Peak. Today, that mountain is a powerful place both to observe the glaciers that still drape the Chugach and contemplate the powers that shaped our landscape.

For its height, Matanuska Peak is not a difficult hike. Over four miles, the trail climbs approximately 5,600 feet, first on a wide gravel road, then on a well-established foot path to the base of Matanuska Peak’s summit tower. The first three miles are easy walking up mostly gradual grades, passing through forest, then brush and smaller trees, and finally tundra. As the trail emerges above treeline, ascending hikers face a beautiful cirque that extends off Matanuska Peak’s southwestern shoulder. Once the trail arrives at the base of the peak’s summit pyramid, it climbs more steeply for about a mile through rocks and talus to the summit. Assuming you stay on or near the main path, which is denoted with brown trail markers, there is never any dangerous exposure, though be careful not to kick rocks onto other hikers down below.

Despite the relative ease of ascent, Matanuska Peak offers extraordinary views. It may offer the best vista of any relatively short climb around Anchorage. The full sweep of the Alaska Range and Talkeetnas wrap around the western and northern horizons. More intimately, the central Chugach are right in front of you. Marcus Baker, Mount Goode, and numerous other peaks rise from what remains of the Chugach’s great glaciers. Bold, Bashful, Pioneer, and other high peaks of the western Chugach tower over the lower, interconnected ridges near Eklutna. Matanuska Peak offers rare views up the Hunter Creek drainage, which is on the backside of the Eklutna icefield. If you’re lucky enough to have a clear and less windy day, it is worth staying on the summit for an hour or more in order to try to absorb the alpine panorama.

To access Matanuska Peak, turn east on Smith Road off the Old Glenn Highway just north of the Butte. Drive to the end of Smith Road and park at a small lot, then walk up the obvious large trail. Eventually, the larger trail ends near what appears to be an old mining operation, and continues as single track. Mountain runners could complete the roundtrip in two hours or so. Most people will want to set aside a whole day to enjoy the climb and the views.

Matanuska Peak offers a chance to contemplate our home from a different perspective, the place where the ice met thousands of years ago. You can imagine, at that time, a series of massive glaciers whose moraine would later fall from the melting ice and create the flat lands of the Anchorage bowl that we now inhabit.