Matanuska Glacier offers breathtaking hike

Out & About, by EOWYN-LEMAY IVEY

I thought I knew Matanuska Glacier. I had driven by it on the way to my trapline winter after winter. Years ago I had floated by it on a raft with Nova river guides. Last winter I hunted ptarmigan on its outlying moraines. And for nearly all my life I had felt the wind and grit of that glacier blowing in my face.

As far as I could tell, it was nothing more than a massive pile of rocks, silt, old gray snow and the occasional shard of intense blue, and I'd seen enough of it. So when our neighbors recently invited us to take a picnic and pay the fee to hike out to the glacier, I have to admit I went along more to be neighborly than because I thought it would be anything that spectacular. But, I discovered, glaciers have a way of surprising you.

After our neighbor paid the way for all of us, including their 10-year-old daughter and our 4-year-old, we drove to the trailhead, shouldered our backpacks and cameras and set out toward what looked like a polar gravel pit.

The trail began much as I thought it would, crossing rolling hills of rocks and dirty ice. In the distance I could see the glacier I had always known -- impressive in size but rather uninviting with its serrated peaks and dominating cold grayness. It was a sunny day, though, and something seemed to draw us on farther, past the picnic tables, past the plastic orange cones marking the trail, toward the mountains of ice where glacier blue seemed to break through like sunlight through clouds.

Even though we had been walking on snow and ice this entire time, it really didn't feel like we were on a glacier until we began to slip and slide across the occasional stretch of dark, shiny ice. Small rivulets of water trickled past us, eating their way into the ice. Soon the black, gravel-riddled ice gave way to glistening snow and the tiny streams became fast-flowing creeks where the water poured through ice chutes.

It was as if we had stepped onto a different planet. We tromped up and over hills of snow and each time we crested a rise and went down the other side we seemed to sink farther and farther into the glacier itself. We were surrounded above, below and on all sides by brilliant, shining white that was at once ice and snow and sunlight.

With each step I became more and more aware of the vast thickness of the glacier beneath me, and it was like standing at the edge of the cliff or imagining time stretching on to eternity and feeling your spine tingle.

Then we began to spot the tiny pieces of blue. We could see them from a distance, pockets in the ice where the color was so intense it was unreal. We would call out to each other and gather around them, peering into the pools of blue that seemed to be lit from beneath.

There is something about this glacier blue that draws you in and makes you crave more. I wanted to touch it, breathe it, taste it and sink into it. Every little piece of blue held me in a momentary trance, and it wasn't just the knowledge that it had formed under the intense pressure of millions of pounds and thousands of years. It was the color itself, bluer than the summer sky, bluer than tropical seas, a blue both radiant and bottomless, serene and heartaching, and it pulled at us.

Like the color itself, though, the massive blue-streaked peaks continued to remain just out of reach. Eventually we found a quiet, flat spot where the glacier had deposited a group of giant boulders. We used them as tables and chairs as we ate our picnic lunch. We inspected the rocks, carried steadily down through the valley by the ice, and we watched ice fleas hop across them.

But all the while that blue kept calling. Finally my husband and our neighbor, Tom, could resist no longer. They left us to hike up a crest that promised a closer look at the peaks. The climb seemed too steep and icy for the rest of us, but it wasn't as hazardous as it looked and, one by one, we all joined them, even my 4-year-old daughter and I.

All I really expected to see from up there was more snow, ice and blue just beyond my touch, but, as I've said, glaciers have a way of surprising you.

At the top, the gentle, white slope dropped off suddenly into a steep crevasse that, far below, was filled with a glacier lake so deep and wide and intensely blue that it filled me with vertigo. My daughter and I stayed safely away from the edge, and my feet remained firmly planted on the snow, but as I peered down into the lake it was as if I had jumped and was suddenly swimming in that blue.

Across the steep crevasse, on the other side of the lake, were the peaks we had been aiming for. They were no longer distant and gray. They were immediate, towering and shot-through with blue, and their dangerous beauty left me breathless and changed.

I'll never see Matanuska Glacier the same again.

Eowyn LeMay Ivey covers outdoors and city government for the Frontiersman. Matanuska Glacier can be accessed at Matanuska Glacier Park at Mile 102 Glenn Hwy. The fee is $8 for adults, $6 seniors and $4 children.