KAHILTNA GLACIER Gibbworld Home Page      Global Warming Page        Glacier Home Page

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MT. McKINLEY (20,320 ft.) Or, call it by its more popular name of Denali, if you like, although I think the official name is still McKinley.  I had to stalk it for three days to get this view from the edge of the town of Talkeetna early one morning.  It is ususally hidden by clouds of its own making.  The hard part is finding the mountain itself.  If you can do that, it is fairly easy to find an airplane in front of it, because the skies around there are just buzzing with them.  I rode one of them and got the pictures below.

MT. FORAKER (LEFT - 17,400 ft.), MT. HUNTER (CENTER - 14,573 ft.), AND McKINLEY AGAIN (RIGHT) All three like to hide in the clouds, but they let me have a look on that same morning.  That low range of mountains in front of McKinley is the Tokosha range, home of Tokositna and Ruth Glaciers.  The Kahiltna Glacier starts at around 13,000 ft near McKinley and winds its way down through a valley, roughly to the south, passing between Foraker and Hunter, through the lower mountains, until it finally gives up about 45 miles from its source at around 1000 ft.  It is not visible in this picture, though, or at least not obvious.

Here comes Kahiltna, winding its way down the valley that cuts through those lower mountains with plenty of fog and clouds in the distance to cut off the view of Mt. McKinley itself. The glacier looks just like a river, except for its color.  In fact it is a river, but it is ice that is doing the flowing -- very slowly.  The snow at the higher altitudes piles up deeply enough and stays long enough that the lower levels of snow get thenselves crushed into glacier ice.  That ice can then slide and deform its way down the slope until something -- such as the warm summer temperatures of the lower altitudes -- can halt it.

And there it goes, on down the valley.  There is a set of pictures by the National Park service showing that Kahiltna is only moderately shorter than it was in 1916, but that it is much thinner from top to bottom.  That is the way it (and many other glaciers) have been losing mass.  Click here for those pictures. They are on page 3 of the site. In the two pictures below, it melts its way to an end at an elevation of about 1000 ft in a valley that looks as if it used to hold a much larger glacier.  In the 1916 picture, it still does not fill that bare area, but it does reach its fingers out maybe to the end of it.

Also in 1916, those smaller glaciers to the side of the main one seemed thicker and longer.  Here is one of them although I don't know its name (or even if it has a name).  From the looks of that big hole ahead of it, I would say that it used to be larger, anyway.

Glaciers, like rivers, can have tributaries.  In this picture the main glacier, Kahiltna, goes off to the left, and the others are much shorter glaciers.  This picture shows the glacier at an elevation of about 4000 ft.  On a contour map that I have, the highest level of the glacier seems to be at around 13,000 or 14,000 ft.

Here is our plane full of crazy glacier watchers banking over a spot on Kahiltna that is at about 3000 ft.  It looks like some of the glacier surface is made of clearer ice than most of it for some reason.  Contrast this with the very snowy view very high in the glacier at the source regions.  Click here for such a picture, and also hit "next" a couple of times when you get to the site.  (Don't forget to come back here, though.)

Here is a section very close to the one above, where you can see evidence of melting in those very blue lakes of melted glacier ice.  Actually, it is the glacier ice itself that is blue, although the surface of the glacier tends to lose the blue color by, I suppose, reverting to ordinary ice.  The ordinary ice consists of much smaller crystals and contains a larger volume of air. The blue color you see is the glacier ice seen through the water.  I wasn't sure about this when I flew over Kahiltna, but it became clear later when I visited (and landed on) Meade Glacier near Haines, AK.  See my section on Meade Glacier.