Camping in the Chugach

Backcountry in the Chugach Mountains

Since my last post a lot has happened. After eating fanesca (a special bean soup) on Good Friday in Ecuador I returned to Vermont for a couple of weeks. I recorded a few songs in Khal's basement in Ontario. I went to the Hyde Away with Benji.Then I flew to LA on my birthday and started leading tours again. After two great trips in the Southwest I drove 3500 miles to Alaska.

Superlatives fall short up here, simply because Alaska is the ultimate. It's beyond badass. My mind is blown.

The mountains of central and southern Alaska dominate the landscape and are big on size and variety. Flying over the Alaska Range is a revelation. Every few minutes a fantastic new mix of peaks and valleys is revealed, horns and cliffs, black, brown and red. Streaks of quartz and rust tilt and spiral above massive glaciers and rushing, translucent rivers. High up in the cirques, tiny tarns and melt pools twinkle blue and turquoise. Down below, the tight mesh of the tundra ripples like a living hide.

Deep in the Wrangells, where the old volcanoes hang out, huge icy peaks stand sentinel over range after jagged range. Icefalls and glaciers give birth to frothing, milky rivers, which smash and slalom down gravel valleys, past surging salmon to the sea. Walking back from the bar in McCarthy at midnight in June, I paused on the footbridge over the Kennecott River. Far to the south a gigantic, barbed wall shone in the twilight, a rampart of the distant St. Elias Range. To the north, upstream, low clouds swaddled the Wrangells, with only the dark tip of nearby Donoho visible. The clouds hugging Donoho's flanks glowed with a dull luminescence, hinting at the hidden glaciers beneath the mist. After standing for several minutes, awe-struck, I crawled into my tent and drifted off.

The Chugach Mountains line the coast, arcing up from the tip of the Kenai Peninsula and across the top of Prince William Sound to meet the St. Elias Range. The Chugach rise straight up out of the sea in places. Part of the drama of the Chugach is the combination of rock and water in all their forms within a few thousand feet of the waterline. Above treeline, the range's forests and brushy flanks give way to dark, worn summits and remote passes. Glaciers are everywhere. Perched high in pockets, hanging off crumbling ridges, pouring out of valleys into the sea. One of my best views of the Chugach was on a gorgeous afternoon in July, standing on Mount Marathon. After climbing out of hemlock and spruce, up into meadows and across avalanche paths littered with rock and ice, we scrambled up the talus and stood spellbound. Below us stretched the long turquoise finger of Resurrection Bay. Across the water, a long sierra marched out into the sea.

Resurrection Bay

Yesterday I hiked up part of the old Iditarod Trail from Girdwood. I left the Crow Creek trailhead under low cloud and spitting rain, hoping for the best. It was a stiff climb up and over Crow Pass, but the rewards were huge. Descending into the valley, I saw Raven Glacier lurking like a moody giant on its craggy perch. The cloudlight caused the ice to glow blue from the inside out, while far down the valley Raven Creek raced between willowy banks, across gray stone and out of sight.

I set up camp about seven miles in, near the Raven Gorge Bridge. On the backside of a little nob, out of sight of the trail at the foot of a talus slope, a lounged away the afternoon as the clouds over Crow Pass opened up little by little. The greenery was divided between low, brushy thickets of willow and alder and flower-filled meadows. Lupine, cow parsnip, blue bell, Jacob's ladder, columbine, bunchberry.

The next morning I woke to a deep blue sky a 360 degree Chugach mountainscape, including the kniferidge between Emerald and Vertigo Peaks at the north end of the valley. I managed to lounge away the morning too. . . reading, writing and pondering why humans love mountains so much. I may never know but I don't care either. Good times in the Chugach!

Vertigo Peak and friends over Raven Creek