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EXIT GLACIER -- AND A LARGE ICE FIELD Exit Glacier (picture to the left) is a few miles outside of Seward, AK, and it is one of the few glaciers that you can drive or ride a bus to.  It is also the only part of Kenai Fjords National Park that you can reach without a boat or plane.   Here is a page with several links to maps of the area. This and the other glaciers in Kenai Fjords drain ice from a huge reservoir of ice called an ice field -- specifically the Harding Ice Field named after President Harding.  Glaciers don't have to start in an ice field, but many do.  There are some good pictures of it in the gallery at this link, and you can find some more links to it on the way to the bottom of my page here.

There is a trail along the side of Exit Glacier that takes you all the way up to the ice field.  I discovered that the round trip is over seven (7!) miles and you gain about 3000 feet of elevation.  OK, not me!  Scroll down my page of pictures of me to see why.  But here is an account written by someone who did it with more pictures of the ice field.  For still more ice field pictures, try this, and this (where you will discover the need to look out for bears up there), and this, and this, and this. So I was content to fool around at the terminus (lower end) of the glacier, pictured to the left.  This is a close up of the very end of the glacier in the first picture above.  There are some signs and some guy down there to give you an adea of the scale.

Maybe I can't climb 3000 feet, but I can do this.  (Yup, that's me.)  That glacier ice I am leaning against may look loose and crumbly, but it was actually hard as a rock.  And cold.  The temperature of the air was fairly warm; after all, it was the melting season.  You can probably tell that by looking.  But it was COLD leaning against that ice.

There is a trail that you can walk a little way up the glacier (without being an athlete) so that you can see it from the side.  Here are a couple of side views.

I am not sure how fast this particular glacier flows down its slope.  Often glaciers flow at just a few feet a year, but sometimes it is measured in miles per year.  In any case, it is hard to imagine this big structure moving like a train from right to left.  If someone took a picture, say every month, and ran the pictures like a movie, then you would see this thing really chugging by.

So here I am looking straight up the side of Exit Glacier while trying to imagine all of that ice sliding down at me.  The Harding Ice Field, all 700 square miles of it, lies well up the glacier out of sight in this picture.  Even though you can't see it here, try this link.  It will show you a view from above that you can zoom and move around on so that you can see it all.

Like most glaciers, Exit Glacier has been shrinking.  The lower end of it has been pulling back over the years, a fact that is documented all over its corner of the park.  Here is a side view of the sign showing where it was in 1951 with its 2007 position in the background.  I also put the 1951 sign in an inset because I couldn't get the face of the sign and the glacier itself in the same frame.

The snout of the glacier is at the extreme lower right of this picture with the meltwater flowing out from under it.  The 1951 extent of Exit Glacier roughly coincides with the vegetation in the distance, although in 1951 it extended a little way into the present-day vegetation on the left side out of the picture. The Harding Ice Field is also losing mass.  Here is a short article about how much it has lost on the average, and here is another, more systematic article showing a few places where it has become a little thicker in spite of thinning over most of its surface.

In 1917, it extended all the way to this sign.  The 2007 position is mostly out of sight behind those trees, although you can see a little of it. And finally, try this link for a You Tube video (about 10 minutes long) of a nice, leisurely, scenic plane ride (with music) over the Harding Ice Field.