Alaska

Alaska

UA 883 heavy this is Anchorage...

One summer I spent a week hiking in the Wind River mountains in Wyoming. Starkly beautiful, but the topography below me now makes them look like a child's sandbox. The sun lazes 20 degrees up, exaggerating the unreal vertical scale: Impossibly deep gorges drop like a Star Wars power station from knife-edge ridges. Needle peaks leap, covering half the distance to us. Forgotten geological terms reappear in my brain: Cirques, valleys, moraines. And the glaciers that carved them all are still there! And then, plainly framed in the far distance, the snowy bulk of Denali towering over the clouds like a ghostly Ayers Rock.

The glaciers reveal their structural properties even through the snow that blankets them. Long streamlines hint of liquid flow, but tumbled fields of crevasses at every turn disclose the solidity of the ice. Low ridges snake downstream as two ice rivers try but fail to merge. Hidden outcroppings beneath, momentarily surviving the relentless grinding, write themselves on the surface as long undulating wakes.

And suddenly the mountains roll into a broad valley. Trees break the endless fields of snow, and a sinuous river meanders like a Family Circus cartoon, winding back on itself until it tires of the view and wanders infinitesimally closer to the sea. A town, with buildings, roads, and farms. Farms! What do they grow in this desolation? Winter wheat, in the summer, maybe.

Now we're over the ocean, steel black water leering through fractal gaps in the bone-cold pack ice. And glimpsed on the far horizon, another plane pacing ours, revealed by its long gray contrail and a flash of red paint. Northwest. Bleah.