MENDENHALL GLACIER Gibbworld Home Page      Global Warming Page        Glacier Home Page

You can click in each picture to get a larger version.  Use the "back" button to return from the larger version.  If the picture snaps down to fit your screen, put the mouse pointer in it, wait for an icon to appear in the lower right, and click the icon to see the large version.

MOST VISITED? Mendenhall Glacier is located just a few miles outside of Juneau, Alaska and is easily reached by road.  That is unlike Juneau itself which can't be reached by road at all, except, of course, from Mendenhall Glacier and nearby points.  Anyway, this makes it a well-visited glacier.  Information and maps are at this site, though the maps seem to be a few years old, showing the glacier a bit longer than it is now. I visited it twice, once on a sunny day and once on a very foggy day.  Here, to the left, is what it looked like on the sunny day.  Both days were in June, 2007.

Here it is on the foggy day, and the fog just kept coming after I took this picture.  I was very near the Visitor Center for this picture, and that is a way to describe how Mendenhall has been retreating.  Around 1940, the glacier reached all the way to that Visitor Center.  That is a waterfall toward the right center of the picture.  If you scroll down the page at this link, you will find an undated picture showing the glacier extending past the waterfall.  It also has several other Mendenhall Glacier pictures.  More on the waterfall toward the bottom of my page here. Mendenhall Glacier has its origin in a very large ice field called the Juneau Ice Field.  From Juneau, this ice field runs north almost all the way to Skagway, and it runs east into British Columbia. Check this for pictures.

I did NOT climb up on the glacier for this picture, and if I had I would not have been able to walk and would probably not have made it back.  And the wall of ice at the front of the glacier is around 100 feet tall.  So, good, old zoom lens! Anyway, this is higher on Mendenhall as it winds its way down from the Juneau Ice Field 13 miles away and at an elevation of around 5000 feet.  The terminus has retreated from the sea but is still only about 100 feet above sea level.

There is that roughly 100 foot ice wall in the background with some icebergs in front of it.  The water is Mendenhall Lake, made of melted glacier ice, and which started to form during the 1920's.  Before that the glacier itself filled up the space now occupied by the lake, another indication of the retreat of the glacier. This lake is about 200 feet deep. Of course, the icebergs have calved off of the glacier.  Calving is the process of ice chunks breaking off, part of the melting process.

One indication that a glacier used to occupy the space above a rock is a system of straight cut marks on the rock.  The lines going left to right on the rock faces in the two pictures above are such cut marks.  They were made by other rocks gouged from the ground by the glacier and stuck in the bottom.  As the glacier moved by, the embedded rocks cut the rocks in the ground under the glacier. So it appears that Mendenhall Glacier once slid over these rocks.

However, here is Mendenhall Glacier from the position of those rocks with the cuts.  In fact, one of the rocks can be seen just to the left of the bend in the trail in this picture.  Behind that is Mendenhall Lake and then the glacier itself in the position it has retreated to in 2007. By the way, compare this, obviously taken on the foggy day, with the second picture from the top to see how much the fog has closed in between the two pictures.

That waterfall is the water in Nugget Creek falling down the mountain.  In 1996,  Mendenhall Glacier reached almost to the waterall on the right side of this channel, though not on the left.  Here is a 1996 photo that I found on the internet showing the ice reaching around both of those lobes of land that are now between the ice and the waterfall.  Unfortunately, the waterfall itself is just out of the 1996 photo to the right.

If you compare that same 1996 picture with this one, it seems to have been thicker on the left side in 1996 even if it didn't extend much farther down the valley.  Here is a 1998 photo in which it has retreated from the waterfall but has not yet retreated around that first lobe of land. Also, check this 1990 video.  In the very first frame, you can see the ice almost reaching the waterfall.  And here is a 2001 helicopter ride to Mendenhall Glacier.