Exit Glacier Hike

The other part of our tour stopped at a creek so we could watch salmon swimming upstream. The natives can scoop up to 50 lbs. a day for subsistence – a whole different perspective on fishing!

There are so many glaciers around here, but the closest one is Exit Glacier and it’s just up the road. You can actually hike to the face of it, but it’s too wet at the bottom to actually touch it. When the water melts underneath, the enormous glacier can slide on it like a raft, which is how it moves. A glacier in Glacier Bay moves 7 feet a day. Imagine? Walking around, you’ll notice these gigantic boulders that are completely out of place. It would take a forklift to move them. Well, apparently, these are called erratic rocks and the glaciers literally drop them randomly as they move along their path! It’s shocking how much debris gets deposited from these glaciers annually. There are construction workers moving the stuff to their sites to build with and then next year they just start all over again!

Have I mentioned that we’re collecting dirt from each state? I have these little bottles we carry with us. It’s pretty interesting how different our 9 bottles look. Obviously, each state hosts a myriad of dirt samples. I’m not trying to be scientifically accurate or anything. I guess you could say I’m kind of after “famous dirt”. So, in Arizona we wanted the reddest dirt possible. In Alaska we opted for glacial silt. It’s all over the place. Even the sand pit at the playground is full of it.