2005/07 Alaska Trip - North to Alaska - Salmon Glacier |
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Edna was here primarily to see the bears, so we drove the five miles to Fish Creek to see the salmon and the bears and eagles. Sadly, the salmon run was late here too, and there were only a few chum salmon milling around in the creek. The bears don’t come unless they can smell the fish, and the eagles don’t come unless there are fish bits to clean up, so we had a soggy few hours for nothing.
Wednesday July 13th
The bears are most active in late evening and early morning, so that’s when the bear watchers have to be there, and I dragged the vacationers off to Fish Creek at 6am in the rain for another soggy vigil. There was a good show 
of eagles as a bear had killed some fish overnight, but there were few salmon and no bears.
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Fish Creek eagles (6.29) |
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The weather couldn’t get much worse so we planned a picnic day up the Salmon Glacier Road, hoping that it would clear enough to be able to see the glacier and the mountains. To our surprise it did and we had a mostly sunny day, with just the occasional cloud covering the glaciers. The road runs along the Salmon River and then climbs steeply past an active gold mine to the nose of the glacier. From there the road hangs on the side of the mountain with the glacier far below, and the driver has to contend with fantastic scenery, holes and cracks in the road, fallen rocks, and cries to stop for some animal or flowers. There aren’t many animals to be seen but hoary marmots seem to do well.
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Salmon Glacier |
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The glacier comes down off the icefield and swings in a great arc to fill the valley. The black stripes you can see in the pictures are rock debris that fell on the glacier and were carried along by it. If this scenery were in the main part of Alaska it would be on every tour itinerary, but because it’s so isolated very few people get to see it.
The road continues beyond the glacier. Last year we drove partway along it, but it was flagged as “unmaintained” and was partially blocked by rock falls, so we’d made slow progress. This time, the rock falls had been cleared and it looked like there might be a new mining operation starting up further up the valley. We drove up to the old Granduc 
copper mine and poked around in there for a while. This was as far as we’d got on the last trip as the weather had turned ugly, but this time it was sunny, so we continued on.
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Salmon Glacier (2.33) |
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The road became narrower, and the scenery became stark: all black and white, with snow and ice dappling the mountains, and iceberg-choked lakes below us. We came to an industrial ruin that we later found had been the crushing plant for the mine. This sat at the foot of another great glacier, though I don’t suppose the workers there appreciated the scenery. Sandie and Edna were looking for rocks (plenty to choose from) while John and I tried different routes to get down to the nose of the glacier, but we were blocked by waterfalls and cliffs.
We’d thought we were at the end of the road, but we spotted another track going into the next valley. The track was a bit narrow, with some plank bridges, but we bounced our way into what seemed wilderness, until a helicopter took off from right in front of us, and we realized that we were into an active mining operation. We had a long, slow drive back down to the Salmon River, but we still had to get out and look again as the scenery’s so amazing.
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