The Harding Icefield HIke

July 20, 2018

Hi! Rachel here.

So today was probably the day I was most excited for. Today we hiked up to Harding Ice Field. This ice field has 38 glaciers that come out of it and it is huge. It has been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

The hike to see it is a steep 4.6 mile hike each way. The first mile and last half mile are pretty flat, but in the rest of it you gain 3,300 feet in elevation. You also get to hike through snow patches to get to the top. Even though it is now warmer, the snow is still melting from the winter. My mom called to talk to the ranger two weeks ago and he said everything above 2.5 miles in was snow and he wasn’t sure that people could make it to the top. Luckily two weeks in warm July melted lots of the snow and we only had patches to climb through.

 In the morning when there were lots of clouds still.

Going on the hike was my mom, my brother, my cousin Amara, my aunt Tarythe, and me. We started with a guided ranger tour for the first 1.7 miles up to Marmot meadows. At this point in the morning it was still very cloudy and foggy (like it often is in Alaska), so we couldn’t see very much of the views. The hike was still very nice though. After we left the ranger, the sky started clearing. First we could see mountains above the clouds and eventually we could see everything. 

Here we stopped at a lookout. It was like an ocean of clouds.

A little higher up we started hiking in snow.

I have been to 50 states and 14 countries, but this view on the hike is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my life. There were snow covered mountains all around us. The trail had us crossing several waterfalls from the melting snow. The waterfalls would go under the snow and reappear at places. Everything that didn’t have snow was very green and there were several beautiful flowers.

That's Amara and me with the Harding Icefield behind us

We made it to the top!

On our way back down. 

The hike was hard work but we definitely thought it was worth it.