Ice-worms, Boofs and Bunny-hops: The Beauty of May in AK

A handfull of us glued in thigh straps last week, huffing glue and MEK while drinking Moose Drool, I think it was, and eating Great Harvest peanut butter chocolate chip mega-cookies at Alaska Raft and Kayak.


Yes, quite a party with Jeff C., Toby S., and Tony P. We had to wait for the glue to dry and so didn't consummate the party the way we should have: with a run down Six Mile's Third Canyon boofing everything in sight with those new, cone-headed, long-tailed, 2011 Alpacka Rafts.

By the time the glue was dry I headed for the Harding Icefield with Amy (my snow algae grad student) and Melissa (my ice-worm student) and Tyler (undergrad assistant). It was an Alaska Pacific University research trip investigating glacier ecology.

The weather was sunny and interesting with some low blowing snow one morning and cooking sun the other. Our main objectives were to drill holes through the snow and into the underlying ice to anchor "ablation cables" for measuring snow melt over the summer using the steam drill:




We had the guys' and gals' tents. The gals' tent looked far more spacious than the guys', and the gals even managed to build a multi-walled wind block from the snow.



Another objective was to install a worm cam to shoot the emergence of ice worms as the season progresses and measure the light and temperatures simultaneously.



Basically we got up at 7 AM, melted snow, ate breakfast and headed out for our drilling project with the steam drill, a pressure cooker-like contraption that forces steam down a hose and so melts a hole in the ice and snow.



The skiing was great.



And the work crew stellar. They called the steam drill, "Hookie".



Tyler Katzmar, Hookie-meister.



We drilled about three dozen holes -- actually they drilled. I was just the supervisor/surveyer.



After we put in the holes, Amy fertilized her experimental plots to see if she can get more snow algae growth by adding nutrients to the snow.



We just worked on a small corner of the enormous icefield. Look closely in lower left to see the skiers.



After two nights on the Icefield we headed out, the gals a few hours ahead of the guys. The icefield was great traveling.





The gals had passed the Harding Icefield emergency shelter a couple hours ahead and would get down so far ahead of the guys that they went into town and got pizza and beer.



Spring had sprung and, boy, was the snow rotten on the trail.




And the bridge slick.




In the three nights we were away, spring had come.



I've written here about the Harding before and even after like my dozenth trip up there I am reminded of how much I like its Pleistocene austerity.

Skiing across its flats lets my mind wander through hypotheses big and small about why and where things live and grow up there, and this was one of the more productive 96 hours I've had there.

It's just that hike up and down with big loads that keeps me from returning every year instead of every other!



But the real reason for this post is to provoke readers with my fatbike's gearing arangement: a trials size dingle:



Look at the drive train! 16 T chainring and 16/18 T freewheel.



These are my two most-often used gears (1:1 and about 0.8:1) when riding wild. Since I only needed to shift two gears (and would need a chain tensioner anyway) I decided to do rear dingle rather than front dingle.

The derailleur is from my old teen-age Campy bike -- very retro.



I tested it today by riding the Brown Bear Trail on Hillside coming and going with ease.

Is it slow? You bet!

If I want fast I'll take my Pivot 429 out and rip, snort and roll. But for stability and crank and slo-mo fun this low geared dingle and 7 psi is just my ticket to ride.

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?