June 20 - to Portage Glacier National Park

Today was a beautiful morning.  I got going bright and early and cleaned yesterday's bugs off the windshield.  Within five minutes, some bird (or maybe a flock of birds) came by and doused the windshield in multiple places.  So out with the rags and ladder again.  I’ve found a wet towel and a dry towel seem to work best.  I have a long handled squeegee, but can’t keep the streaks out.  I could use one more step on my 3-step ladder to reach the very top, but we don’t look out way up there anyway (so it doesn’t get cleaned).

I was watching someone set up their jeep to tow, which led to chatting, and thus we didn’t pull out until about 11am (again).   It was raining to start off our drive, just like the day before when we left Homer.  We only drove 121 miles today, but we didn't get to the campsite until about 9pm.

 

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At the Cooper Landing Historical Society Museum, they displayed a couple projects the local school kids (one room type school) did.  Some of the students spotted a large slab cut from a Sitka spruce being cut up for firewood.  They acquired it and science and history lessons were learned through dating the tree and studying things that happened at various times of its growth.

Another class project was turning a roadkill bear into an articulated skeleton.  The estimated 800 lb. brown bear was hit by a pickup truck in 2002. This was a huge project.

The museum was right on the Kenai river.    I walked to the back and could see folks having fun on the water.

 We headed to the Portage Valley.  Portage was sunk in the 1964 earthquake and the town was not rebuilt.  The multiple glaciers in the area remain.

The visitor center is built upon the terminal moraine left by the Portage Glacier in 1914.  It was named for a couple congressmen who were lost when their plane disappeared in 1972 en route to Juneau from Anchorage.  Four men were on the plane.  No sign of the plane nor the men were ever found after extensive searches.

There were many icebergs in the Portage Lake.  Only 10% of an iceberg's volume is visible.

They have models of all kinds of things.  Here is a 50x enlarged mosquito.

 

The snow was difficult to walk in, sometimes your foot would go down 6-8".  The speck out there is David. 

It was incredibly beautiful.

I loved the blue color the glacier ice shows in the sunlight.

The path started like this, but quickly turned to snow.

We camped at the Williwaw Campground at the base of the valley of the Middle Glacier.