AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2016 - 74
LAWSON KNOWS this part of Alaska well from a bike/raft journey where
he explored it at ground level. Here he's on the beach near Yakutat. A
broken fuel pump at Gustavus (facing page) was a temporary setback.
A pilot had a secret stash of full gas cans, and the author brought a
siphon hose-just in case.
We continue southeast over the Copper
River Delta, scene of one of the world's
largest annual sockeye salmon runs. Bear
tracks are visible on the muddy ground, a
sign the coastal brown bears that feast on
the fish are ready for them to make their
yearly arrival. It's too early in the season
for the red-colored salmon to begin their
charge up the opaque river, however, and
we see just two thin and presumably hungry bears walking listlessly near the broad
and deserted beach.
Beyond the delta, massive peaks-some
of them covered by glaciers-rise to vertigoinducing heights. We pass by the Bering
Glacier, rising to 7,000 feet just a few miles
inland, and then the Yahtse and Guyot glaciers are even taller.
At Icy Bay, the Malaspina Glacier
74 | AOPA PILOT August 2016
clings to Mount St.
Elias, a jagged, imposing, cloud-shrouded
hunk of rock that towers 18,008 feet into the
heavens-roughly 10 times higher than the
altitude at which we're traveling. We pass
serenely over the bay and its icebergs, some
of them electric blue, others encrusted in
dirt and silt. The uniformly cold water and
ice make for smooth air above.
On the coastline near Wrangell-St. Elias
National Park, the landscape goes lunar. It's
undulating, strewn with boulders, and dirty
gray. Sinkholes create giant pockmarks that
look like meteor strikes. We fly over it for
many miles before I realize that the uneven
surface below isn't made of earth-it's a
sprawling ice field that is slowly clearing out
incalculable quantities of rock and dirt as it
relentlessly and forcefully grinds to the sea.
We pass the curiously named
Disenchantment Bay where a pair of humpback whales cavort near the mouth, then
climb and start to turn inland for the most
direct route to Juneau, our ultimate destination on this day. We expect to overfly the
Melbern Glacier and follow it to Glacier
Bay, but strong headwinds radically reduce
our groundspeed at the higher altitude. We
drop back down along the coast and accept
the more circuitous and picturesque route
with a groundspeed that should still get us
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2016
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