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The East Glacier Trail and a River of Ice

East Glacier Trail · Mendenhall Glacier · Juneau, Alaska
The Mendenhall Glacier descending between forested slopes to a gray glacial lake, with snow-streaked peaks behind, framed by spruce branches.

Most of the year I am walking in Appalachia, but come spring the work takes me far north and west, to Southeast Alaska, and this is one of the first walks I get back to each year. The East Glacier Trail climbs the slope across from the Mendenhall Glacier, just outside Juneau, and strings together a series of overlooks of the ice. It is a moderate loop of a little over three miles, with maybe 750 feet of climbing, and it works its way up through some of the finest rainforest anywhere.

This is the Tongass National Forest , the largest national forest in the country and the great temperate rainforest of North America. Walking into it in May is like stepping into a green world. Sitka spruce and western hemlock stand tall and straight, the ground between them buried under deep moss, and everything drips even when it is not raining. The trail winds among the trunks and over roots, soft underfoot. I stopped a while under one big old conifer just to look up the length of it.

Partway along, the forest opens onto broad slabs of bare bedrock, swept smooth and rounded. That is the glacier’s own signature. Not long ago, in the scale of these things, the ice sat right here, grinding the rock flat as it moved, and the bare slabs and the young willow and alder lower down mark where it has pulled back. The glacier is part of the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area , and it has been retreating for a long time. The ground you walk on here was under ice within living memory.

Then the overlooks begin, and the Mendenhall Glacier comes into view, a thirteen-mile river of ice spilling down out of the Juneau Icefield and ending in its own lake. The lake is the color that always stops people, a pale, milky green that comes from glacial flour, rock ground so fine by the ice that it hangs suspended in the meltwater and scatters the light. Snow still caps the peaks over it in May, and the high country holds plenty more. A thin waterfall slides down the mossy rock toward the water, fed by all that snow melting out.

I took my time at each overlook, the way these places ask you to. There is a lot of weather in a Southeast Alaska spring, low gray skies that hang in the valley one hour and break open the next, and the glacier looks like a different thing under each of them. It is a long way from the oak-and-hickory ridges I usually walk, and that is exactly the point of coming. Same slow pace, a whole other world.

A narrow dirt footpath winding through a temperate rainforest of tall spruce trunks and bright green moss-covered ground.
The trail winds through moss-draped spruce and hemlock, deep in the Tongass.
Looking up the tall straight trunk of a large old-growth conifer surrounded by other tall evergreens in a dense forest.
Looking straight up the trunk of an old-growth conifer.
A hiker standing on a wide expanse of smooth gray bedrock in the forest, with a mossy green slope rising behind.
A broad slab of bedrock scoured smooth by the glacier that once covered it.
A snow-capped mountain rising above a pale, milky green glacial lake, framed by dark spruce trees in the foreground.
A snow-streaked peak stands over the pale, glacier-fed lake.
A milky pale-green glacial lake seen through a screen of spruce trees, with a snow-streaked mountain rising beyond.
The lake glows that strange milky green from glacial flour.
A broad view over a forested valley and a wide glacial lake under a heavy, low gray sky, with spruce in the foreground.
The wider valley opens up under a low Southeast Alaska sky.
A thin waterfall sliding down dark mossy bedrock to a jumble of large wet boulders at its base, with evergreens above.
A thin waterfall slides down the mossy rock toward the lake.

All photos are original, taken on this hike.

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