Showing posts with label glacier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label glacier. Show all posts

18 December 2014

Remember "You'll Never Walk Alone"?

After exploring glacier caves, hiker looks at his photos and realizes he wasn't alone

Michael Glidden was wandering the ice-blue remains of a glacier in the Chugach National Forest Saturday when he spotted one particularly, deep, dark tunnel, he says.

The Anchorage retiree and his two American Eskimo Dogs, Shasta and Aspen, ventured inside. Temperatures had dipped to 29 degrees along the riverbeds outside.

It must have been about 10 degrees warmer there in the dark. "Echo! Echo!" Glidden yelled.  He listened. Water dripped.

‘“Very cozy in there, actually," Glidden recalled. He set his camera down and snapped a picture. The flash was blinding.

"I continued to explore the main cave for some time. ... It wasn't until I got home and looked over the pictures I had taken that I realized when I took the picture, my flash had caught a hibernating black bear only yards from where I was."

It wasn’t until he got home and began posting pictures online that Glidden noticed an unusual shape, hidden in the shadows, had been there in the cave with him all long.

The photo was cloudy but the claws gave the animal away.

Mr. Glidden went on to say that it was "an honor" to get that close. I have to tell you: "honor" isn't the word that comes to my mind ...

30 August 2013

Aerial View: Lake Clark Pass Glaciers




I recommend watching this in full-screen mode ... aerial view of glaciers during an eastbound flight through Lake Clark Pass on Wednesday, August 28, 2013. (Video by Bill Roth, from the Anchorage Daily News website)

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/08/29/3049524/lake-clark-pass-glaciers.html#storylink=cpy

07 July 2013

Glacier Keeps Revealing Pieces of 1952 Plane Crash

Search persists for remnants of 1952 glacier plane crash


For 60 years, rough glacial terrain east of Anchorage held tight the 52 men killed when their Air Force plane slammed into Mount Gannett on Nov. 22, 1952.


Now, for the second summer running, plane wreckage and human remains are being given up by Colony Glacier, more than a dozen miles from the crash site.

The mission to recover and, eventually, identify the human remains is being led by the Hawaii-based U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and its recovery leader, forensic anthropologist Gregory Berg.

Read the whole story here.

05 February 2013

Video: Daring adventures Into Alaska's Blue Ice

Alaskan Alan Gordon and friends spent a year filming their climbing feats on the Juneau Icefield and inside its blue-ice cracks and tunnels. Gordon is working on a documentary that he hopes will call attention to Alaska's vanishing glaciers. In the meantime, the U.K.'s Daily Mail has posted a series of spectacular still photos and a video from Gordon that'll be especially thrilling to ice climbers. "My goal for this film is to show everyone places in time that won't be there forever," Gordon told the Daily Mail.

Click here to see the video.

05 November 2011

This is how Ice Ages begin



By Robert W. Felix
November 4, 2011
http://iceagenow.info/

Look at this weekend’s Halloween snowstorm. Headlines across the U.S.A. called it “historic.” Historic because it dumped record snowfall on at least 20 cities from Maryland to Maine. Historic because it was the most snow – and the earliest – in many areas since the end of the Civil War.

And we’re not talking mere tenths-of-an-inch here. This snowfall shattered the old records, it obliterated them.

The 14.6 inches of snow that fell in Worcester, Mass., almost doubled its previous single-day October record of 7.5 inches set in 1979, while Hartford’s 12.3 inches crushed the previous single-day October record of 1.7 inches, seven times more than its earlier record.

But with 32 inches (81 cm) of snow, Peru, Massachusetts, won the prize. Two-and-a-half feet! Waist deep! Before Halloween!

This is how ice ages begin.

Not by huge glaciers slowly grinding out of the north, not by temperatures plunging to Siberian levels, but by more and more snow.

Unfortunately, we’re getting that snow.

According to Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, three of the four snowiest winters in the Northern Hemisphere have occurred in the last four years.

Three of the four snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters have occurred since 2008. http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1

Look at last winter.

Last year’s blizzard-filled winter and unusually cold, wet spring left record snowpack at more than 90 measuring sites across the western United States.

By Memorial Day, epic snowpack had been reported in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California.

On California’s Mammoth Mountain, the snowpack measured an incredible 728 percent of normal.

At Oregon’s Mt. Bachelor Ski Resort, snow totals reached 650 inches, far eclipsing the previous record of 606 inches.

In Washington, Crystal Mountain broke its all-time snowfall record for the second time in only 11 years.

And the snow kept coming. In early June, Utah’s Snowbird ski resort reported snowpack at 525 percent of normal

“There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long,” said Emily Moench, Sunbird’s communications manager.

Read that again. “There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long”!

This is how ice ages begin!

And lest we forget, just a few months ago the Missouri River suffered its second 500-year flood in 15 years. Why? Because of heavy rains and melting record snowpack.

But the news gets even worse.

Glaciers are growing in the United States.

Even though last winter’s historic snowpack has not yet melted, new snow is already piling up in the Rocky Mountains.

In Montana’s Glacier National Park, in Colorado’s Front Range, in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, the glaciers and snowfields are actually gaining volume.

When Bob Comey, director of the Bridger-Teton National Forest Avalanche Center, compared photographs of Wyoming mountain peaks, he found “significantly” more ice in the Teton Range compared with two years ago.

“I’ve never seen a season with a gain like we’ve seen this summer,” said Comey.

And when scientist Nel Caine checked on Arikaree Glacier 20 miles west of Boulder, Colorado, he measured between 2 and 3 feet of snow from last winter and spring still remaining in late September.

Meanwhile, scientists have measured a “very modest” increase on Sperry Glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

Mind you, these are not the only glaciers growing in the United States. Glaciers are also growing in California, Alaska and Washington state.

This is how ice ages begin.

And our leaders keep screaming about global warming.

# # # # #

Editor's Note: This applies to the UK as well and, of course, the entire northern hemisphere.
-- Alan Caruba

16 July 2011

Long Day Behind the Wheel

But a really good one.

My mom and I headed out early this morning for the Matanuska Glacier, some 130 miles ENE from the house. Once there, I suggested that we head west to Talkeetna. It was sunny so there was a chance that we might be able to see Denali (Mt. McKinley, to you Lower 48 folks who never knew it had a name for several thousand years before Congress got involved).

The glacier was right where I remembered it - go figure, huh?


We doubled back through Palmer and into Wasilla, where we topped off the gas tank & picked up some more food for the road. Off we went, northwest up the Glenn Parks Highway.

Just as you reach the village of Talkeetna, there's a small parking area from which you can see Denali if the weather is clear. The mountain is so big (20,322 feet) that it makes its own weather system, and it's most often shrouded in clouds.

We didn't think we could see anything, until I finally realized a portion of what looked like a cloud bank wasn't moving with the rest of the clouds. Lo and behold, it was part of The Great One (that's what "Denali" mean, in the original language). Here I've zoomed in on the portion of the north shoulder, so you can see what we finally realized we were seeing. It's not even the summit, just a shoulder that's about 2/3 of the way up. It's a BIG mountain.

Talkeetna was wall-to-wall people, as Princess cruise lines had just dropped off a few hundred passengers to get on bush planes, trains, jet boats, or buses, heading out to the great interior of Alaska. There was barely enough room on Main Street to maneuver my truck between the weary passengers, trudging with heads down while texting in traffic.

Talkeetna is really built up since the last time I was there, some five or six years ago. Lots of new construction, new shops ... new everything, as "the town that Princess re-designed" continues its quest to become the Branson of the North.

Pah.

Anyway, we saw the glacier, part of Mt. McKinley, the village of Talkeetna and Mom was happy to have been in world-famous Wasilla (the place former Governor Sarah calls home).

It was a really good day.

05 July 2009

A Hike to Byron Glacier
























































My wife and I decided that the local park trails don't provide enough of a challenge, so we headed southeast to Portage Lake and hiked to Byron Glacier.
.
It's bear country there (as it is most places around here), so I decided to carry openly, as an experiment. For the record, no one paid the slightest bit of attention until at the end, when we returned to the parking area. A tourist who had apparently just gotten off a Princess bus was glaring at me like she had just spotted John Dillinger. I smiled and said, "Hi!" She glared some more. Probably from some blue state where guns are E V I L ... Her problem, not mine.
.
The trail is well maintained, a gravel path rather than the asphalt which inserts such a jarring note while walking through the woods.
.
It was around 70 degrees, hazy and a rather more humid than normal, which make a warm day for an Alaskan. The bugs weren't bad, either, as the 98% solution of DEET we applied was more effective than the junk we used last time.
.
Glaciers create their own micro-climate, with cold air and wind pouring off the thousands of tons of ice. When we got within a quarter-mile of the ice, there was a stiff, cool breeze. By that time, it was welcome. The half-dozen or so people at that end of the trail were walking with their arms out, like so many gooney birds about to make a take-off run.
.
The streams pouring out of the glacier were fast and cold. The coloring visible in the photo above is typical.
.
(Please excuse the periods between the paragraphs. Blogger does weird things to spacing when photos are added.)