22 Miles to the Knik Glacier

The local Water Rescue Team was down a few members for last weekend's training, due to the local Search and Rescue team stealing a bunch of responders for their own training. We took who we had and headed upriver. We go UPriver for secret reasons, which may or may not include the fact that when we break down, we can float back to our trailer. :rofl It may or may not be pertinent that we've floated our way back two of the three times I've made this trip... This day it was a bit wet and gloomy, but we made the best of it and had a great time.



Cliff fires up the GPS at the start of the trip to record our progress.




Our progress begins typically. :rofl




Spirits still high, we start off. Cliff grins a little.




Grins are justified at the moment. Jess and Steven elected to brave the tow on our new rescue platform, dubbed the "banana boat." Keep in mind, this water is fresh off the glacier, and just about as cold as water can get in liquid form.




Pieter maintains his stoic poker-face, although underneath the calm is another nature altogether that threw a couple of us in the river later. :rofl Fortunately rescuers were standing by...




We stopped briefly along the way. I should have done this differently to show the enormousness of the glacier, but oh well, I got it in a couple other pics.




We made it to the glacier after a while, and parked amid icebergs where the river begins.




There was a ton of traffic in the area, it being the weekend. We saw a number of boats, planes, and this helicopter.




Jess was a little cold after that ride on the banana boat.




This guy had a sweet boat. Some sort of canoe with an outboard attached, it seemed. He was cruising.




Cliff builds a bit of a fire to warm up before we head back downstream.




Here's the glacier in one direction. You can see it extends out past the horizon. It does this in the other direction too, although it's actually two separate glaciers joining together a few miles uphill from where we're at.




Here's some silty glacier water, fresh off the ice. I swam up and check out an iceberg at one point. It was interestingly rotten, not at all the picturesque smooth ice one would think of. Must have been sitting in the water for a while.




And lastly, here's a bit of rock formation at the glacier's edge.




On the way back, the rain picked up, and I wasn't able to open my eyes more than tiny slits, much less take pictures. Rain at 30mph feels like hail! My face was red for the rest of the day. Anyway, the trip was pretty uneventful, except where Pieter threw himself, Jess, and Steven all off the boat, along with the banana boat which we were hauling instead of dragging to save fuel. :rofl And then about three miles upstream from our pullout we ran out of fuel completely. Normally our boat can go 53 miles on a tank, but this trip, dragging our banana-boat, we were slowed down and used more than normal. Ah well, that's what training is for, and in addition to getting some sweet pictures, I learned a lot as well! Hope you enjoyed the outing too!