Portage Glacier and the Whittier Tunnel

After visiting the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage on our trip down to Seward, Alaska on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, we swung across the highway to Portage Lake to visit Portage Glacier, and then drive on to the town of Whittier.

Our visit to the glacier was by the Ptarmigan, a medium size tour boat:

As we pulled away from the small dock, we glimpsed a view of a snowfield high above the highway:

The views up --

-- and down --

-- Portage Lake were breathtaking, so the boat ride itself was worth the trip.  Approaching the bottom of the lake, we were excited to catch our first glimpse of Portage Glacier, flowing into the lake.

There are several types of glaciers:

-- Alpine glaciers, also called mountain glaciers, are found throughout the world’s high mountains. If a mountain glacier increases in size and begins to flow down the valley, it is then described as a valley glacier.

-- A cirque glacier is a small glacier that forms within a cirque basin, generally high on the side of a mountain.

-- A hanging glacier is a glacier that originates high on the wall of a glacier valley and descends only part of the way to the surface of the main glacier.  Avalanching and icefalls are the mechanisms for ice and snow transfer to the valley floor below.

-- A calving glacier is a glacier with a terminus that ends in a body of water (river, lake, ocean) into which it calves icebergs. A tidewater glacier is a calving glacier with a terminus that ends in a body of water influenced by tides, such as the ocean or a large lake.

In contrast, glaciers other than calving glaciers lose their ice through melting, and leave the rocks, gravel and silt they bring down with them as moraine piles stretching along the ground.

Because Portage Glacier ends at Portage Lake, it is a calving glacier.  Here, it has deposited some baby bergs and chunks of ice in the lake:

Who wouldn't want to take a selfy with a rock star.  In this case, it might be more appropriate to call her an Ice Queen:

The boat brought us up close to the glacier, permitting us to see the ceracs (pillars of ice) forming at the toe of the glacier.  Eventually, the ceracs (or pieces of them) break off, or calve, to deposit chunks in the water.  In this case, the leading edge of the glacier demonstrates how blue its ice is.  This is because the clear ice absorbs all the colors of normal light except certain colors on the blue end of the spectrum, and as the bluer light reflects, we get that brilliant, indescribably blue color:

Here is one of our favorite portraits of Portage Glacier:

Here is a link to our Flickr album with all our photos from the Portage Glacier tour.

Our trip to the glacier did not depart until 3:00 pm.  Having finished our visit to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center before noon, we had some time to kill and so drove on to Whittier, Alaska, which is further down the road from Portage Lake.  To get to Whittier, you need to drive through the Whittier Tunnel.  The 2.5 mile, one-lane tunnel must be shared by cars and trains traveling in both directions, and it usually needs to be aired out in between trips (with jet turbine ventilation, another first!). This unique design that enables a single lane of traffic to travel directly over the railroad track saved tens of millions of dollars over the cost of constructing a new tunnel.  The one-way trip takes about 6 minutes at 25 miles an hour.  Traffic is let through in any given direction about every half hour.  The vehicles must line up and await a signal to proceed.  In the photo below, the tunnel entrance is the small A-frame structure in the background:

It was quite an experience travelling through the tunnel, with our big truck's tires slipping and sliding on the train track rails, and perhaps only a foot of clearance on either side:

Once we got through the tunnel, we found a spartan community with a large port.  Virtually all of the city's approximately 215 residents live in a single, multi-story apartment building which, due to the extreme cold of winters here, also houses most services such as grocery, hair cutteries, and the like:

We exited the tunnel about 1:45 pm and realized that, to get back to Portage Lake in time for our 3:00 tour, we had about 15 minutes before we had to make sure we could catch the 2:00 release of traffic back through the tunnel to Portage.  This only permitted a quick drive around Whittier and back to the tunnel.  Still, despite not having a chance to walk around Whittier, we found it an intriguing and unusual place to visit.  Be sure to put this on your itinerary if you visit Anchorage or the Kenai Peninsula.