This week we’ve made several flightseeing trips over the Bagley Icefield, the largest nonpolar snowfield in the world. The Bagley is a vast expanse of white, as pure and pristine as powdered sugar, punctuated only by turquoise glacial pools and the rugged peaks of the St Elias Mountains. Waterfalls spew forth and cascade from every steep crevice. We fly low enough to distinguish ewes from rams in the small herds of creamy-coated Dall sheep that dot the dark, craggy outcroppings.
Bagley trips usually include a stop on Goat Creek Glacier. (“Welcome to Goat Creek International,” Paul will say.) On a sunny day the gleaming white can be almost blinding. This week Goat Creek Glacier’s surface is coarse grained like a snowcone and crunches under your feet. Ice crystals sparkle like a trillion multifaceted gemstones. With the arrival of summer solstice and the almost never-ending hours of sunlight, summer is heating up. Thousands of rivulets of frigid water, the intense, improbable, transparent blue of Windex, flow energetically across this glacier’s surface.
Larger than life glaciers of every shape and size dominate the surrounding landscape, a hundred or more, many of them not yet named. If glaciers make you glad, the Bagley is bliss.
An interesting sidenote: on one of his trips this week over the Bagley, Paul spotted Grizzly bear tracks in an elaborate series of large, aimless, overlapping rings. In decades of flying the Bagley this is a first. Only a bear crazed by starvation – or debilitated by a stroke - would waste so much precious energy on such an erratic path. We can only guess at the story.
