2018/07 Arctic Part 3 - Salmon Glacier |
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We drove through the town and along the bottom of the cliffs. There looked to be a new mine right there on the cliffside; certainly convenient for
loading ore into freighters. Past the mine we came to the Alaskan border and the town of Hyder.
There are no US border guards, so it is one of the few places where the border is truly unguarded.
The road up the Salmon Glacier valley swings back into BC in about 8 miles, so there is no access by road to the rest of Alaska. If you go there, take your passport as you’ll find on your way back that there is a Canadian border post, where the guard will want your identification and may charge you taxes on anything you’ve bought in Hyder. That’s if you can find anything to buy in Hyder. The town is not photogenic and I forgot to take a picture at the border; this picture was taken in 2004, but not much has changed since except for a new hut for the Canadian guards. The place is almost a ghost town, its local mines closed.
The town’s campground is called Camp Runamuck, with the emphasis on the muck. In 2005 we were towing our big trailer and had little choice but to camp there, in a muddy morass. Back then it had been busy despite the rainy weather, but now in sunshine it was almost empty. We wondered why – no Americans coming to the area?
Just beyond Hyder is the Fish Creek wildlife site. We stopped there to ask about the salmon run, but the ranger said they had not arrived yet. A brown bear had come through the previous evening, probably looking for salmon too, but he hadn’t been lucky either.
There are a number of sites in Alaska where you can go to watch grizzly bears fishing, but most of them are remote, requiring floatplanes or 
boats and stays at expensive lodges. This is the only one we know of that you can drive to and watch bears for a few dollars. On our first visit access had been free and the place was completely unpublicized; we found it by accident. However, timing is critical: no salmon means no bears eating salmon. We’d be stopping there again though on our way back, just on the off chance
.We continued up the Salmon River Road. There are active mines in the valley and we were having to watch out for loaded ore trucks hurtling out of side roads and rushing down to the wharf. As the road climbed we had views of the river and then we stopped at the overlook of the toe of the Salmon Glacier. Except that we could no longer see the toe from there; it had receded a few hundred yards since the overlook was built.
At the end of the maintained road, at about 3500 ft, we came to this splendid view of the Salmon Glacier where it flows down from the ice field, hits the rock wall beneath the road and divides. The black lines are rocks fallen from above and carried along. The flow to the south (left) ends at the toe, where it feeds the Salmon River. To the north, the glacier ends at Summit Lake, often full of icebergs.
We climbed the cliffs behind the road to look at the flowers and get a view of the glacier with no cars or people. The climb was a mixture of walking through boggy meadows and clambering up the rocks with many false trails, but there were flowers everywhere. There was also an easier section that looked to be part of an old road.
We drove on past Summit Lake with its icebergs, towards the Granduc Mine. More hanging glaciers added to the view. 
The road is not maintained past the glacier overlook so we had to drive around boulders; a crowbar is handy for moving them out of your way.
The Granduc has a backdrop of the spectacular Berendon Glacier. In sight from there are a half dozen smaller glaciers, most unnamed.
The Granduc was once a copper mine. The mill has been derelict for decades, but this time there was a new group of huts nearby and the
track down to the toe of the glacier had been blockaded, so somebody may be prospecting there.
This entrance is not to a mine; it’s a tunnel for truck traffic, used to avoid the massive snowdrifts that would cover the road beyond this point.
Structures like this dot the valley. We could see a fully operational mine across the valley, though we couldn’t see how to get there, not that visitors to a gold mine are usually welcome! We were buzzed by a helicopter on our last trip up here; we’d been driving offroad and may have been trespassing.
We were tempted to camp up there amongst the old mine workings, but the bears of Fish Creek beckoned and we headed back to the road.
On our way down we were on the road’s crumbly outside edge. Sandie wasn’t keen on her spectacular view down the cliffs to the glacier, so she insisted on my driving on the left. Of course this led to a few exciting moments for the people that were still coming up.