HEADLAMP: Wrangell St. Elias

Note: This is the first in a three-part series on the Wrangell Mountains.

If you’re on a transcontinental flight at night, you can see a flickering series of nodes and tendrils curving across the landscape. Lamps on houses, roads, gas stations, abandoned downtowns, connect in a web that obliterates darkness. This is rural America, fenced by wire and light. In darkness or daylight, it is infrastructure, and not watersheds or mountain ranges, that segment and define the landscape.

Yet even now, a half-millennium after western contact, there are still whole mountain ranges and river systems in North America in which the only transportation infrastructure consists of a game trail across the tundra, or bear prints in sand on the margins of glacial moraine. No less improbable, we humans can follow those markings across some of the world’s most remote mountain ranges after driving or flying just a few hours from Anchorage.

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is a place of statistical superlatives. It is part of the world’s largest non-polar ice cap, and the largest contiguous area of protected parkland, which includes the adjacent Kluane and Glacier Bay parks. Despite those distinctions and because of the daunting landscape that creates them, even most Alaskans have not explored the park beyond driving the narrow gravel road that leads to McCarthy. Today, McCarthy and its encircling mountains are in many ways more isolated than a hundred years ago, when JP Morgan and the Guggenheim family built a railroad from the coast through the mountains to extract ore from the heart of what would become Wrangell St. Elias National Park.

The wilderness has been reclaiming this landscape since the mine stopped operating in 1938. Avalanches, alders, and washouts have obliterated the railbed the followed the Copper River to the coast. Another old route for miner travel remains, however: a faint footpath across Chitistone and Skolai passes to the Alaskan and Canadian interior.

For most of their length, the Wrangells cannot be crossed without passage through extensive icefall and over immense glaciers. The single non-technical pass is Skolai, where the Russell Glacier descends from Bona and Churchill Peaks before draping itself across a saddle in the ridge. The pass itself is moraine-encrusted ice, which flows in two directions. Most of the Russell’s meltwater flows north, forming the White River, a major tributary of the Yukon. The rest, pooling and then draining out of Skolai Lake, ultimately joins the Copper River. These waters, entering the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, respectively, may not meet again until they are snow falling once again on the high peaks of the Wrangells.

Maps indicate a route through Skolai Pass. On paper, the sequence of dots or dashes look as orderly as a road or a series of poles with powerlines running between them. On the ground and the ice, those marks seem absurd. The path over Skolai Pass follows the edge of the Russell Glacier, crossing a layer of moraine that rests on disappearing ice. Bear tracks indicate the best passage, weaving amidst huge boulders, glacial erratics that were deposited in a time of deeper ice. The bear tracks in sand and gravel are spaced with the cadence of one who takes a stroll through the park after dinner, a relaxed and contented pace. Unlike, well, me, the bears have no uncertainty about the viability of their route, or the weather over the next few days or hours. The existence of their tracks is reassuring, since game almost always take the most logical path, whether navigating brush or glaciers.

The Russell is thinning in a new and hotter climate, so what would have been a relatively level walk several decades ago now is more of a sidehill passage, mostly on the Russell itself but sometimes on the slope of Castle Mountain, its western border. As the ice melts, the glacial silt, with its infinitesimally small grains of sand, liquifies and oozes downhill, gaining speed slightly as it drains toward lakes or moulins below. After the mud runs off, the next layer of glacier is exposed to the air, its rock-flecked blue sparkling when the sun strikes it. Along with a symbolic route, maps suggest the existence of a small lake on the western edge of Russell Glacier, right at Skolai Pass. The heat is enlarging this lake, and a new lake has formed just to the north of it. Skolai Lake itself is much larger as well, as the southwest shoulder of Russell Glacier has receded by approximately a mile while losing more than a thousand vertical feet of ice in recent decades.

This ice pass is ephemeral. At some point it will be a walk across land. The timeless icefields of Churchill and Bona will seem mortal as the ice caps become shorter year by year. The harsh katabatic winds that sweep off the glacier, forcing campers into little recessed valleys for shelter, will dissipate. As the winds retreat, the tundra serengeti will advance, and probably within our lifetime vegetation will link the White and Copper River valleys across the path, marking the Age of Brush.

This is the first in a series of articles about traversing from Chusana to McCarthy in the Wrangell St. Elias mountains.