The Matanuska Glacier & Palmer Alaska

On our way to see the Matanuska glacier we stopped in Palmer for lunch. Palmer is a town about 30 minutes north of Anchorage. It was settled in the 1930's when FDR relocated about 200 farmers from the dustbowl to Palmer, Alaska. It is the home of the Alaska State Fair, held in August and showcasing mammoth vegetables weighing hundreds of pounds. The growing season is short, but with almost 24 hours a day of sunlight this area grows incredible veggies. We ate at the Colony Inn Cafe which is located in the dining room of a former dormitory used in the 30's for temporary housing. It is now an inn.

I took these shots from outside the van while we were stopped on the highway for road construction about 10 miles from the road to the glacier, about 100 miles northeast of Anchorage on HWY 1. This is one of the most beautiful drives I've ever seen, but only in Alaska do they take out both lanes of the mountain road at the same time!

This is the edge of the glacier as seen from the road. I believe this is one of the few you can see from the road and it is also one of the few valley glaciers. It exists on a valley floor. Most of the other Alaskan glaciers are alpine glaciers which hang off mountain slopes. It is 24 miles long and 4 miles wide and advances at one foot per day taking approximately 250 years for ice to form upglacier and advance to the terminus (that's the part we're looking at here).

Fireweed grows up just in front of the glacier. It is amazing how it sprouts up out of the rocks.

This is called the moraine. It sounds like meringue but it's not. It is rocks and finely ground dust that have been carved off the underlying rock and pushed up in front of the edge of the glacier. You have to walk over a lot of it to get to the glacier and it can be in really big piles.

At some point, you look down and realize there's ice under the rocks and then you see the incredible blue color of the ice under the rocks. It's blue because the ice is so dense it allows the entire spectum of light to be absorbed except the blue which is reflected and therefore seen by your eye. Cool huh?

It's amazing!
Of course we explored and posed for the family pic (yes, I really am here).

We didn't go ice climbing however. (This is not our family)

What a handsome guy! That's why I took this picture but then I noticed....a study in perspective. If you look above his head and to the right about an inch, you'll see the ice climbers that are featured in the photo above this one. Just in case you got lost in the up close photos, this shows just how HUGE this place is!

Yes, he really is on the phone on a glacier! AT&T would be proud!