Over Our Heads at Worthington Glacier

Okay, so we almost bit off more than we could chew.  We admit it.  But it all started so innocently.

Camped here in Valdez, we couldn't resist a drive 30 miles north to Worthington Glacier on our first day here.  It sat so innocently, to look at it from the entrance road at the Richardson Highway:

We didn't even get worried when we saw all these warning signs at the trialhead.  Nope.  We were only going to stroll up as far as we felt comfortable to get a view of the glacier.  We already knew we wouldn't be able to reach the glacier itself.

The trail led us ever more steeply up.  It slowly grew more rugged and less distinct as we climbed, which put us off our guard.  Put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, and it won't even flinch.  Well, anyway, the view as we got higher was spectacular:

Here we had a breathtaking view of the toe of the glacier.  That steep black slope just beyond Kathy is solid ice, covered in dark gravel and soil.  Note the blue columns of ice under the topsoil.  Water gushes out of the bottom of the glacier at the lower right in the photo below:

From the viewpoint above, we turned again to look back at the outflow pond and the surrounding valley, and it was looking pretty far below us.  However, we saw a viewpoint a short way above us that we thought would give us a dramatic look at the whole bottom of the glacier, so we soldiered on up.

Wait.  That's looking pretty steep behind where Kathy is climbing, and it's all loose scree.  How much higher should we climb?

Well, let's think about that issue after we admire this premium view of Worthington Glacier:

We realized that we had climbed too far up the steep scree that it seemed foolhardy to try to slip and slide back down.  Any momentum downward, and we wouldn't stop until we crashed into the chasm through which the glacial outflow poured.

We decided we needed to keep climbing to the ridge above us.  It was pretty dicey finding footholds in the loose, sandy dirt and the crumbly slate scree.  But we persevered, until we found ourselves perched on a fin rising up from the outflow pool toward the top of the glacier.  We hoped it was an encouraging sign that it looked as if a trail ran up and down the fin:

At any rate, our view of the glacier was incomparable.  We thought about, and rejected, a plan to continue climbing the trail up the shoulder of that grey hump in the background behind Kathy in the photo below:

My gosh that's a long way down, with no way to get down:

Okay, so, compared to sliding to our death down the scree we had climbed, this steep trail down the fin didn't seem so bad:

We worked our way slowly down the fin.  The photo below is marked to show our path from the top of the scree where we realized we had to climb to the ridge (on the far right in the photo), up to the ridge, then further along up the ridge to a viewpoint, then back down the knife-edge of the ridge to a set of switchbacks that brought us steeply into the valley where we could make our way back to the trailhead and parking lot where our Jeep Dusty waited loyally for us.

That was a little more than we planned for our visit to Worthington Glacier.  But it was so worthington it.