Slip Sliding Away

This bergy bit is a breakaway piece of the Portage Glacier on Portage Lake, Kenai Peninsula.

This is your final warning: Get to the Kenai Peninsula as quickly as possible. Please don't wait another year. It might be too late.
We are on the northern edge of the peninsula – just a hop-skip-and-jump for Anchorage, 50 miles to the north.
We drove alongside Turnagain Arm, perhaps one of the prettiest drives in all of Alaska. It was named in 1778 by William Bligh of HMS Bounty fame. Bligh served as Capt. James Cook's Sailing Master on his 3rd and final voyage, with the aim to discover the Northwest Passage.
Upon reaching the head of Cook Inlet, Bligh was of the opinion that both Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm were the mouths of rivers and not the opening to the Northwest Passage. Under Cook's orders Bligh organized a party to travel up Knik Arm, which quickly returned to report Knik Arm indeed led only to a river.
Afterwards a second party was dispatched up Turnagain Arm and it too returned to report only a river lay ahead. As a result of this frustration the second body of water was given the disingenuous name "Turn Again".
The place is just crawling with glaciers. But the end is in sight. The glaciers here are in full retreat and what we saw will not last much longer. But what we saw is simply incredible.
We arrived on a dank, dismal day with low clouds shrouding the snow-covered mountains. We camped in the Chugach National Forest amid alders with their fluttering leaves. The mountains rise up in front of our RV through the mists.
We made our way by car to the nearby visitor's center and became immersed in the world around us. When we watched the movie of the Portage Glacier, we were inspired – but, at the movie's conclusion, the screen rose up, the curtain parted and we all sat before a glass wall that looked across Portage Lake. The glacier which had been visible when the center was built just a few years back, and which was designed to be the star of this presentation, has retreated around the side of a mountain and is out of sight.
We were a little depressed at this. But after a good night's sleep we decided to investigate. We hiked two miles up a path, gratefully wearing our anti-mosquito equipment. We arrived at Byron Glacier which, while retreating, also is a spectacular sight. The blue ice is a thick carpet for the underwater stream that pours down the mountain under the ice. We trekked onto the snowfield and photographed the beauty of it all.
Then we headed by our car through a tunnel that had been built in 1942 to permit supplies shipped into the port of Whittier to get inland. This tunnel, which run 3.5 miles through a mountain, now has been modernized so cars, RVs and trucks, as well as trains share the passageway. Trains go first. Then east-bound vehicles, then trains heading west, followed by vehicles. It's a toll road that is actually paying for itself. We arrived in the little town of Whittier which isn't much to write home about. There is an impressive harbor with lots of heavily built sailboats and powerboats. Many fishermen come through the tunnel, dragging their boats behind them. And the fishing is just beginning as the salmon is beginning to make their run back upstream to spawn. They are running two weeks late this year for some reason. So we are just at the start of this wondrous journey.
As we returned through this tunnel, the sun welcomed us on the Portage side. Not a cloud in the sky, spectacular visibility. We again visited the visitor center and listened to the recordings of the aboriginal people, telling about the subsistence lifestyle. We also heard recorded stories of a gold miner who was attacked by a Grizzly Bear. He was badly mauled but managed to roll away while the bear collected her cub. But then the bear made one more attack on the old man before leaving him. He then had to walk 20 miles through the mountains to Seward to get medical help. They don't make 'em tougher than that.
We listened to a geologist who had been walking and taking measurements on Portage lake when the massive 9.2 earthquakes his Anchorage in 1964. The quake continued for more than four minutes – a lifetime in quake history, since they normally last around 30 seconds. He said the frozen lake began to buck under his feet. Water disappeared under the ice, then returned and pushed through the frozen lake. He and his men scrambled for their lives and were rescued later in the day. In Anchorage that day, the quake was so violent that a subdivision on the south side of the city fell 30 feet and hundreds of homes disappeared. We had walked the path to this subsidence. There is a cliff there now and low wetlands where homes used to sit.