Wrangell - St. Elias National Park (the biggest of all!)

 Hello! There are a ton of pictures today!

At the visitor center in Copper Center we joined a ranger talk and made a short interpretive walk.  Here is a picture of the Boreal Forest.

This is the way Alaskans lived in the old days. A tent on some logs in the Copper River.  (no thanks)

We are now in a Lodge near Chitina (CHIT-na).  It is very nice and includes a hearty breakfast! You can't walk around the property without either bear spray or a gun..... goodness!

The McCarthy Road takes you to this bridge.  Once there, you cross and find the town of McCarthy and the town of Kennecott.  These towns are at the entrance to the Wrangell - St. Elias National Park (established in 1980's).  It is the largest NP at 13 million acres!  This park is six times the size of Yellowstone National Park.

We don't want to miss any of the sights and, as a rule, you always use the facilities if you see them.  This is what we are talking about in this park (I will mention that they are all very clean!).

This may be one of the best pictures I have ever taken - along the McCarthy Road.  The skies were clearing and some blue was sneaking through.  I saw the reflection and yelled for Carsten to stop!

This morning, we finally managed to do the Flightseeing we have been trying to do for 3 days!  The sun was out and it was a glorious morning!

This is a rock glacier.  There are not many of these in the world, many of them in this National Park.  There is ice in this glacier, but not much.

This shows some of the mountains, a glacier and a braided river.  The braided appearance is due to the glacier slit that washes into the river, settling in the river to change the flow.

The point where two glacier comes together looks much like intersecting highways!

This stretch of the mountain range is called "Seven Sisters" because there are seven that look similar.

This is a sink-hole in/on a glacier.  

This remined any of you Houstonians of the Katy freeway? This is how a glacier looks - the variety of colors is the glacier silt and the rocks that get pulled into the glaciers' path.

This is one of the highest peaks in North America (can't remember the name).  The clouds were so cool!

This picture is trying to show the vastness of these four mountain ranges.  These four include 9 of the 16 highest peaks in the U.S. ... I mean really !?!?!?!

This is St. Elias - topping out at 18,008 ft.

This is the "stairway" glacier - the only bigger one in the world is in the Himalayas.

Another glacier, notice the BLUE ice - the ice looks blue when it is so compressed that all light is absorbed - except the blue light.  Also shown here is the "ribs" that show how the glacier moves each year.

Did I mention that this was a very small place?  The seat Carsten and I were sitting in was like the backseat of a 1966 VW Bug - but smaller!  Quite cozy!  It was only a four-seater.

After our flight, we headed into McCarthy and caught the free bus for Kennecott.  We thought we might check out the copper mine.  The mine opened in 1911 and some of their processes were the first of their kind in the world.  In the peak year they produced copper worth $32 million.  The mine closed in 1938.