Glacierissimo

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

STEWART, B.C. — Imagine you’re playing with clay and you decide to make a mountain — a really steep one, shaped like an upside down ice cream cone. Then you make a couple more and put them next to the first one. Then you carve a little road into the side of your mountains with a popsicle stick, spiraling up one, over to the next, and on to the third.
The topography of your little clay creation would resemble greatly the terrain we covered today on the way to visit the Salmon Glacier. The only thing is that the popsicle stick would make nice, smooth roads around your mountains, while the ones we drove were, along several stretches, deeply pocked with potholes or ribbed with washboards and covered with gravel. Imagine such treacherous stretches are strategically placed near the deepest precipices, so that a swerve to avoid a pothole brings you to the very brink of a near-vertical drop.
Such were the conditions we put our esteemed driver into this afternoon — a driver not fond in the slightest bit of near-vertical drops from the top of a ladder let alone an alpine mountain. Said driver was pressed to the point of profanity along a couple of really dicey sections, but managed to keep his cool all the way to the top of the third mountain.
Great was his reward! For, at the end of our trek, we beheld one of the hugest glaciers we’ve ever seen. We were about even with its highest point, looking down on its long icy green length in a huge backward S between several mountains and down to the valley below. Great cracks and crevasses marked its surface, and while it looked a bit sooty lower down, its crest was pure, brilliant white in the afternoon sun.
The drive began at Hyder, Alaska, the neighbouring town to Stewart, but the road crossed into Canada again part way up — and it was from that point that the road improved considerably, although even the Canadian side had its scary bits. In addition to the many snow-topped mountains and deep gorges filled with rivers, and the little cascades that trickled down in various places, we passed many groves of huge cedar trees — not quite as big as the Sequoias, but impressive — towering above us with thick trunks that went out of sight down the mountainside.
There were also landslide areas, one of which placed a huge boulder right by the road to build our confidence, and another that let loose a little trickle of stones just as we passed, to get our hearts beating a bit faster. We passed several clumps of snow, right by the road, and on our way back we saw a group of young people stopping their van and getting out to stage a snowball fight!
Fortunately we didn’t encounter too many other vehicles on the road — because clinging to the inside or outside lane to let them pass was a bit more excitement than we needed, and the dust billows behind them weren’t that appealing either.
We almost didn’t go at all. We set out to have a look earlier this morning, but after a stretch of lurching and bobbing over potholes, we decided we didn’t need to see another glacier if it meant 37 kilometres of road like that, and we turned back. However, at the carwash lineup, we chatted with a tour leader who was waiting to clean her mini bus, and she said the road got better on the Canadian side. Then, back at the trailer after lunch, another gentleman came by looking for a stamp and asked us if we’d seen the glacier yet. His RV caravan group had gone by bus and he said it was spectacular.
At that point, we asked ourselves, when had we been intimidated by a little rough highway before? Not on the way to Haines Junction. Not at the Top of the World. Not at the Dempster. So why now? That did it; we headed out right away. And we got back again in one piece to tell the tale. The moral of the story is, take the road less traveled — but be sure your seatbelt is tightly fastened! And bring home treasured memories of amazing sights that few people get to see.