Ice Worm Tunnel

Peggy and I have been going “ice worming” every week for the last month or so. It’s part of an ongoing project that I am involved with that's studying the ecology and evolution of ice worms.

Ice worms are small, dark colored relatives of earthworms, known only for sure to live from northern Oregon to Alaska, with some distant relatives living near Bomi in eastern Tibet. In Alaska and Washington State they have been studied in the summer as well as in the lab. During the summer they are common on glaciers near, and slightly below, firn line, especially at night. They are about half an inch long at most in the Alaskan populations I’ve seen, but they are bigger and more numerous in Washington State and British Columbia.

In summer they come swarming to the surface in huge numbers on some glaciers, coastal ones mainly. The glaciers draining the Harding Icefield can be thick with them below about 4,000 feet above sea level, but we have never seen them in the Alaska Range, or on the Matanuska, or in the Wrangells. There’s a bounty on them in the Alaska Range, so if you have GPS coordinates for Alaska Range populations, let me know. In Chugach State Park I have found them on the upper Eklutna and Whiteout Glaciers and Paul Twardock saw them on the Eagle Glacier near APU's Nordic Center. We looked on Flute Glacier, but it was a bad day for them, and we found none.

A good paper on ice worm behavior is by Dan Shain of Rutgers University and a handful of his students, entitled “Distribution and behavior of ice worms (Mesenchytraeus solifugus) in south-central Alaska" published in 2001 in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, Vol. 79, pages 1813-1821. He’s my collaborator on this project. My job this winter is to track their location as winter progresses. Until yesterday they were active on the surface. Yesterday with six inches of new snow and at temperatures near their lower lethal limit (~20 F) we found only dead ones on the surface of glacier ice where last week they’d been actively moving about.

There have been other interesting discoveries: like last week (and a couple years ago) when APU graduate student Melissa Becker and I saw worms crawling off the glacier ice, atop new, fresh snow over rocks. During our visits in October and November when the worms were out they were out at 2:00-5:00 PM, too. I expect that they were out all day.

Anyway, we’re getting some satisfying exploration each week out at near Byron Glacier, like inside this tunnel that penetrates a big avalanche cone that's actually a micro-glacier:

More Harding Media

Here's a map of our recent route out and back across the Harding (in red). The green line is what Jim Lokken and I skied in the 1983 Hope to Homer Wilderness Classic; the purple line the solo route in 1984; the yellow route a grad student and I skied in 2005. There've been other trips, too: Jon Underwood, Paul Adkins, Chris Flowers and I took mountain bikes and packrafts across and on to Homer in 1995, but there're already too many lines on the map to include that one, the multi-sport route with Peggy, Vern Tejas, Nora Tobin, Bob Kaufman, and Dave Hooper, or the big circle trip with the kids.

Of course I made a video of last week's trip. You Tube stripped my choice of music: Led Zeppelin's "The Ocean" from the Houses of the Holy album. Todd Tumolo, who's 24, likes Led Zep and the music seemed to capture for me the feel of the place.

Here it is:

100 Miles on the Harding

APU student Todd Tumolo and I are just back from a hundred miles of skiing back and forth across the Harding Icefield, one of the most amazing places in all of Alaska. I guess counting a crossing as once across, and an out-and-back as twice across, these would be like my 10th and 11th crossings since 1983. This trip was collecting iceworms for a genetic study that might shed light on how iceworms disperse from glacier to glacier.

What makes the Harding Icefield so amazing is the play of light and weather on the assortment of nunataks and the expanse of ice and snow. So vast and disorienting can the Icefield be, that in the the pre-GPS days it was a terrifying crossing!

I once skied from Skilak to Chernof solo during a Wilderness Classic and was afraid of getting lost and/or being hit by a storm. I had nothing but a pin-on compass and a bivy sack. Cody Roman (then 14), Jazz (then 12) and I did a big week long loop in 2001 when we were hit by a storm of ferocious winds and rain. There's simply no way to dig into the hardpacked firn and with such a long fetch, the wind speeds are tent-flattening. I had to put on a face of total calmness while inside my head I feared the tent would be ripped apart and we soaked in freezing rain at 50 miles an hour.

But now with GPS, my familiarity with all of its glaciers and peaks, and a good kit I feel comfortable up there.

My favorite way to cross it is north to south, skiing into the warm sun. One May we skied from Exit to Nuka and I never put on gaiters or gloves so warm was the ski. Skiing south one looks at the icy north faces of the nuktuks, nunataks, and mountains and they are so picturesque. Skiing north you see the barren south faces of choss-heaps. Most of the rock is schisty country rock but the nuktuks of the central Nunatak Plateau are granite and the route to the Chernof passes across the granite and schist contact. The precipitation gradient is so steep that standing above the Chernof Glacier and looking at the McCarty Glacier peaks one sees a view of mega-glacier draped mountains like the Antarctic Peninsula while looking toward Truuli Glacier you see peaks bare of snow.

The geography of the Icefield is singular. The Icefield proper stretches between the Chernof and Exit Glaciers. South of the Chernof are a series of range crossing glaciers separated by rocky ridges. These unique "saddle-passes" are broad passes from big glacier to big glacier that have steeper cols above them that cross the ridges. Late in the season, like last week, the ridge crossings have deep and nasty, roof-ripping bergschrunds, whereas the stretch from Exit Glacier to Tustumena has nothing but "guppy" sized cracks. In other words, from Exit to Tustumena is rope-free travel on a flat, flat, flat icefield with distant peaks. Whiteouts and blizzards make for what Todd calls "full-on iPod conditions". From Tustumena south to Nuka Valley is more typical mountainous terrain with steeper hills, rocky passes, and cracks.

One measure of how great a place is for adventuring is whether you'd go back or not. As we returned to Exit Glacier after six days, Redoubt's ash wearing the fishscales off my skis, I thought about what my next trip up there might be: "Ski to Sea", a ski tour across the Icefield followed by a fjord-hopping packraft paddle back to Seward.

Anyone interested?