Impossible! Astounding! Unbelievable! Yet another crystal clear blue sky day in Alaska during what is reputed to be the rainy month- July!
We drove back to Girdwood for breakfast and to be ready to catch the morning bus transportation that I had arranged and pre-paid months ago with Manny, owner of the Seward Bus Lines, for the 80 miles from Girdwood to Seward. I screwed up and failed to print out the e-mailed confirmation that I had received from Manny, so I was unsure of the time that the bus was to pick us up at the Girdwood, Alaska Tesoro Gas Station on the Turnagain Arm Highway. With sketchy wi-fi and Internet connections, looking up e mails was challenging. I managed to connect to the restaurant’s wi-fi and looked up the months old e mail from Manny and discovered that we weren’t scheduled to be picked up at the Tesoro Gas Station until 2:45 P.M.! We had 4 extra hours to enjoy that we didn’t think we originally had!
We drove back to Portage and headed to the Chugach National Forrest Glacier Visitor Center and hiked in the sunshine to the Byron Glacier. On the hike, a fun and amazing chance encounter- as we hiked towards the glacier, coming in the opposite way on the path I recognized and embraced none other than Sean, the Victory motorcycle rider with the flat tire 50 miles outside of Whitehorse in the far-off Yukon! Truly a chance encounter on the way to the Byron Glacier!
To walk on a glacier- What an experience! To actually walk several stories in height up and around on the glacier, feeling the cold and ice and massiveness of the thing, is to get a true perspective on what we had been marveling at only from afar. The way the light refracts blueishly, the size of the crevasses created by the movements of this active structure, the shapes of the chunks of broken-off ice, and the roar of the river of run-off water from the melting glacier right at our feet were truly memorable sights to behold up close and personal. A real wow experience to treasure.
Then………… the wheels started to come off.
We drove back to the Tesoro Gas Station and were ready and waiting for the 2:45 P.M. bus to Seward by 2:30. We waited at the gas station for an entire hour and no bus came. I called Manny, and asked if the bus was coming at all. There was a screw up- his records showed that we were supposed to be picked up at the nearby Girdwood Train Station at 10:30 A.M. He told me that his driver waited there for us this morning for twenty minutes and then left. He said he would refund at least part of our $80 in bus tickets and apologized for the mix up, but I think it must have been my fault- I think I read an old e mail which didn’t have the finalized correct information.
Bev was rightfully pissed at me for causing us to wait around for an hour in a gas station parking lot for a bus that wasn’t ever coming. I somehow convinced her to come up onto the shoulder of the Turnagain Arm Highway, dragging our large, wheeled suitcase to try hitch-hiking the 80 miles to Seward. No luck. Feeling like a complete jackass, I drove the rental car to Seward, knowing that, due to my goof up, only one of us would be able to ride the Alaska Railroad back as planned from Seward to Girdwood tomorrow and the other one of us would have to drive the rental car back to Girdwood- alone. Feeling like a complete putz for my mistake, I volunteered to drive the car and let Bev take the rail journey but she refused, saying that taking the train was a really big deal to me and she didn’t want to take that experience off of my plate. Pretty good wife, huh? Thanks so much, honey.
We arrived in Seward early in the evening and checked in to the Breeze Inn. Some months earlier, I had read an on-line article in Traveler Magazine that sang the unqualified praises of a little known gem of a Seward restaurant that, in gest billed itself as serving “Warm beer and lousy food” called the Exit Glacier Salmon Bake. We found it two miles out of town and were warmly greeted by our waitress, the smiling Nicole. The food and drink were wonderful and memorable, as was Nicole’s service.
After dinner we drove about 7 miles to the Exit Glacier Visitor Center, and after donning our mosquito netting, set out on the trailer to go to visit up-close our second glacier of the day. This glacial visit was not as impressive as the Byron Glacier visited in the morning- much longer hike, couldn’t walk on the Exit Glacier (closed off due to instability of the ground at the edge of Exit Glacier), colder and windier, but we did get to see clearly the recession of where this glacier extended to, compared with the greatly shrunken size it is today. Still an impressive and worthwhile visit.
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