Between the Glacier Discovery Train tour and our trip to Cordova,  I have been seeing a lot of glaciers lately.  Most glaciers on the earth are rapidly melting, and I wonder what these Alaskan Glaciers will look like if I return to them in 10 or 20 years.  The photos don’t do any of them justice.

I could have cropped the photos just on the glaciers but decided to include the surrounding late August or early September landscape.

My favorite glacier on the Glacier Discovery Train tour was Trail Glacier.   Since we were ahead of schedule and had great weather, we went past the Grandview stop in order to see it.

Bartlett Glacier formerly covered the area where the current train tracks run (back then the tracks had a crazy turn called “The Loop” in order to gain elevation through the narrow valley).  The significant glacial retreat gave the engineers room to make a simple s-turn to replace the loop.

Last year we also hiked to the icebergs at Sheridan Glacier Lake, but the sky was never clear enough to see much of the glacier itself.   This year we had much clearer weather while in Cordova and saw the impressive Sheridan Glacier from the road many times.

We could see the below glacier from bridge 339 on the Copper River Highway.   The ever changing Copper River washed out the bridge in 2011.  The Copper Spike is an interesting book on the area, giving a feel for how difficult transportation is in this dynamic landscape.  

We recently went to Valdez Glacier Lake.   The kayaks help show the scale.  I also like the iceberg “barge” on the right with its huge load of gravel.  It is a small demonstration how glaciers are massive bulldozers in the landscape.

Tomorrow, the long journey to Virginia begins, as we drive east to catch our September 15 Alaska Marine Highway ferry to Bellingham,  Washington.   We have 4 nights on the ferry, and I’m looking forward to it!