Let WC Take You on a Jet Flight

The jet flight from Anchorage to Juneau, on a clear day, offers some of the most spectacular country in the world out your cabin window. The problem is, there aren’t that many clear days on the Gulf of Alaska. WC got lucky in August 2015. Here’s a flight-seeing guide to just some of the amazing scenery along the 577-mile flight path. So grab a port side window seat and enjoy the scenery.

(WC was fighting glare off the water and ice. Sometimes WC had to resort to polarizing filters to manage that glare. The polarizing filters reacted with the coatings on the windows, giving some photos an odd color cast. Sorry about that.)

Colony Glacier at bottom, Lake George in middle, Knik Glacier at upper right and Knik Arm above Cook Inlet at top left.

Knik Glacier used to dam the outlet to Lake George, triggering glacial floods each spring down to Knik Arm. Knik Glacier has retreated and no longer dams the river.

Miles Glacier in foreground, the mighty Copper River in the upper left, flowing down towards us en route to the Gulf of Alaska

In the last ice age, Miles Glacier, together with the easterly-flowing Childs Glacier, dammed the Copper River, helping create ancient glacial Lake Ahtna, that sprawled across south-central Alaska. Today Miles Glacier ends in Miles Lake, part of the Copper River.

Folding and rippling in the ice and moraines of the Martin River Glacier, an ice stream in rapid retreat. The brown moraines overlay stagnant glacial ice.

Martin River Glacier is a rapidly dying glacier. The lower third is dominated by old moraines in which the ribbons of ice and medial moraines trace compression-generated curves.

The striking and beautiful Barkley Ridge, with Bering Glacier to the left and the vast Bagley Icefield in the background

The layers of argillite (purplish), siltstone (dark brown) and sandstone (tan) are visible for miles. Geology from 28,000 feet.

Bering Glacier, the second largest glacier in Alaska and the smaller of Alaska’s two Piedmont glaciers

Bering Glacier is big, and if it were not for Malaspina Glacier, its huge neighbor, Bering would be better known than it is. Named after Vitus Bering, the leader of the Russian exploration party that brought the first Europeans to Alaska in 1742, it’s also shrinking.

Icy Bay. Guyot Glacier to the lower left, Yahtse Glacier to the center and Tyndall Glacier in the upper right. All three glaciers appear to be in rapid retreat.

There aren’t many harbors that offer protection from storms along the Gulf of Alaska shorelines. Icy Bay was too treacherous to be useful for decades, choked with ice from calving glaciers. Most of those glaciers have grounded and retreated to land now. Icy Bay is mostly ice-free today. Icy Bay isn’t icy.

Malaspina Glacier. Outside of Greenland, this is the largest glacier in the Northern Hemisphere and a glimpse at what the northern United States must have looked like during the Wisconsonian Ice Age.

The extraordinary moraines criss-crossing the lower Malaspina Glacier are medial moraines that have been buckled and twisted by the compression of the ice flow down from higher elevations. It preserves the complex dynamics of the glacial flow as the river of ice spills out onto the coastal plain.

Yakutat Bay at left. Hubbard Glacier at upper center, the largest tidewater glacier in Alaska. Russell Fjord and Nunatak Fjord to the right. The Yakutat Forelands in lower center.

All of the land in this photo south of Russell Fjord is part of the Yakutat Terrane, a continental plate fragment transported by plate tectonics to a collision with the Gulf of Alaska coastline. The collision has driven up much of the Coast Range, including Mt. St. Elias, which reaches 18,008 feet. It’s the same process that created the Himalayas, on a smaller scale.

Harlequin Lake, center, with the Dangerous River draining it to the left. Yakutat Glacier in the distance.

As recently as 2004, Yakutat Glacier extended down to the peninsula on the easterly shore of Harlequin Lake. It has retreated so far north that it has resolved into two smaller glaciers now. Harlequin Lake itself will eventually become another bay in the Gulf of Alaska as the Dangerous River erodes away the terminal moraines at the southerly end of Harlequin Lake.

Alsek River running down to Dry Bay

The Alsek River, like the Copper River, is one of the very few streams to penetrate the Coast Range mountains, draining the southerly Yukon Territory. While it is no longer periodically blocked by glaciers, the Alsek River still carries the highest sediment load of any stream WC has canoed or kayaked.

Mt. Fairweather, looking straight down.

Our flight route took us almost directly over the summit of 15,525 foot Mt. Fairweather. The summit is in the lower center of the photo. If you trace the summit ridge east and north, at the upper right of the photo is the summit of 13,235 feet all Mt. Quincy Adams. The two summits frame the 9,000 foot high north wall of Mt. Fairweather, the head of Grand Plateau Glacier.

Clouds covered most of the balance of the route, as the flight began its gradual descent into Juneau. WC’s photos don’t begin to do justice to amazing scenery and geology, but perhaps are adequate to give you a faint idea of why WC thinks the views along this flight path are unsurpassed.