And then there's the beauty you earn

On Root Glacier, looking toward Bonanza Ridge and Porphyry Peak
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, AK

13.2 million acres. Thirteen-point-two million acres. The largest unit managed by the National Park Service, equal to two Adirondack Parks, or six Yellowstones. Of those 13.2 million acres, 9 million acres of designated Wilderness. The country's largest wilderness area, big enough to swallow three each of Yosemite, Boundary Waters, and the Bob.

Superlatives continue: St. Elias, the fourth-highest mountain in North America, rising to 18,008 feet only ten miles away from the ocean. Bona, the highest volcano in the country and Wrangell, one of the most massive active volcanoes in the world. The continent's largest subpolar icefield (Bagley), longest valley and tidewater glaciers (Nabesna and Hubbard), and watershed that drains into two of the largest rivers (by discharge): the Yukon and the Copper.

Rock, ice, and water; tundra, forest, and wetland. Wolves and wolverines. Bears, both brown and black. Dall sheep, caribou, moose, marmot, pika. Ptarmigan, terns, golden and bald eagles. That 13.2 million acres of space through which they roam.

If there is such a thing as true wilderness left in the world -- an unfathomably large area, dominated by natural forces and inhabited by creatures that may live out their lives without ever encountering any sign of man -- it's here, in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve.

Into this huge swath of mountains and rivers and ice cut two lonely roads, accessing merely the northwestern quarter of the park. Narrow ribbons of gravel and dirt, rutted and potholed, overgrown with shrubbery in some sections and overrun by hares in others. The roads are as wild as the terrain they try to breach: the 59-mile-long McCarthy Road gave my friend's Jeep a flat tire, and the 42-mile-long Nabesna Road was washed out at mile 30. "Driving the Nabesna Road can be an adventure," the NPS audio guide both warns and promises, "Have fun and take it slow. Soak it in. Pull over. Step out of your vehicle and take a deep breath of the Alaskan air. Drink in the beauty."

Beauty, indeed. But the sort of beauty you have to earn.

Wave of ice on Root Glacier

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The scenery in Chugach National Forest -- particularly, Portage Valley -- is undeniably spectacular. Awe-inspiring. Photogenic. Popular, and popular for a reason. I loved working there and am excited to return this summer -- to again step out the door into a world rich with mist and midnight sun. Bears, berries, salmon. Snow-capped peaks and that impossibly blue glacial ice. My packraft is eager to go bobbing back down Portage Creek, my XTRATUFs ready to splash along the Trail of Blue Ice. This summer, I promise myself, I'll camp out more; I'll get out on Prince William Sound; maybe I'll finally try bushwhacking up Byers or Begich. I'll continue to walk and walk and walk, 4 a.m. dawn until 12 a.m. dusk.

And I'll return to Wrangell-St. Elias.

Early evening shadows on Root Glacier and Donoho Peak

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It seemed like an ambitious plan, for my friend and I to squeeze in a trip to Kennecott over a long weekend last August. At least 8 hours of driving, each way (not accounting for the condition of the McCarthy Road), plus another hour or two to catch a shuttle down the 5 miles beyond the Kennecott River footbridge. A 2 mile hike to Root Glacier, lugging in all our water and supplies, hoping that a campsite would be free, that bears would stay away, and that the groups on the trail were just there for the day, leaving us with peace and quiet and an enormous confluence of ice and rock all to ourselves overnight. This dream in mind, we rearranged work schedules, ordered a set of crampons each, packed food, and watched as weather forecasts alternated between sun and rain.

The day came. We headed off after work: Anchorage, Palmer, the winding scenic drive down the Matanuska River valley (which, I realized, I'd longed to see seven years earlier, as I passed by en route to Denali). The Matanuska Glacier, glowing as the sky dimmed toward night. Glennallen and Copper Center in the dark, marveling at how long it took for the stars to appear. After turning into the park and catching a few hours' sleep, we woke groggily to the sight of the Copper and Chitina Rivers, gleaming silvery-bronze with pre-dawn light.

Silvery braids of the Chitina River

Wrangell-St. Elias! We were in Wrangell-St. Elias! As my friend navigated the road's potholes and hares, I promptly fell back asleep, occasionally opening my eyes to see dream-like scenes of distant mountains, spindly spruce, ducks paddling through mirror-calm ponds, and old railroad bridges soaring over narrow chasms. Then we were in McCarthy, streaming with sunshine; Kennecott, with its half-restored rickety red mine buildings clustering up a hillside; on the trail, realizing that the odd shapes far down the valley weren't weirdly-shadowed clouds, but the slopes of Mt. Blackburn, stretching 16,390 feet into the sky. First glimpses of Kennecott and Root Glaciers: the long, wide former piled with rocky debris (supraglacial moraines), but the latter -- a tributary -- shiny white before the confluence.

Somewhere between awake and dreaming, along McCarthy Road

Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark, with Donoho Peak in the background

Trail alongside Kennecott Glacier (coated with lumps of glacial debris), with the white tongue of Root Glacier flowing in from the right. Donoho Peak straight ahead, Blackburn hiding far behind and high above it

A glacier! I'd managed to touch Portage earlier in the season, but had never actually set foot on much less wandered freely across the surface of a glacier before. While my friend chose to rest in the luxurious early-evening sunlight and the last of the day-hikers were departing, I dashed off to clamber and slide around the hard, smooth, blindingly-bright ice. Every new marvel set me giggling with delight: the scraping sound of the crampons, the crunch on softer surfaces; the striations and waves and supraglacial streams, how the whole mass appeared to move even as it stood grindingly still; the light, tilting farther into evening, filling the glacier and surrounding mountains with blue shadows. Blackburn, to the distant northwest, still wrapped in cloud, and, straight north, Stairway Icefall, a 6300-foot wall of broken ice. ("Stairway to Heaven Icefall", the USGS had proposed calling it in 1965. Whoever it was at the Board on Geographic Names that insisted on cutting the "to Heaven" part clearly never saw the feature in person.)

All that space and wildness, well worth the effort it had taken to get there.

Stairway [to Heaven] Icefall, churning into Root Glacier. Regal Mountain (13,845 ft) up there somewhere, tucked behind numerous 11,000-12,000 ft. prominences, unnamed on the map

I woke early the next morning and headed off to traverse a "trail" along the slopes above Root Glacier, following it until it disappeared on a narrow, steep-sided lateral moraine, which happened to coincide with the place where a bear was ambling down the mountainside toward me. Returning to our campsite, I met my friend and we headed out onto the glacier, which was even brighter in the midday sunshine. Again, it was all giggles, all delight, doubly so with two of us to see and celebrate the marvels. A waterfall! A crevasse! Seracs smoothed by sinuous streams, slot canyons between walls of ice. What looked like a flat white surface from a distance was in fact a wonderland of shapes, textures, and colors. A playground, for us and for the dozens of day-visitors, who were, by mid-afternoon, tromping along behind guides, seeking scenic meltpools and scaling icy cliffs. Plenty of space and wildness for us all to enjoy.

Crevasse, Root Glacier

When I returned to the glacier again after dinner, 8 or 9 p.m. -- the light quiet and the shadows deep, the world empty -- I had that space and wildness all to myself. After scaling the by-then familiar access point, I meandered vaguely north and west, both lured onward and constrained by the topography of the ice. By that point, I was done giggling at every new experience and on to simply marveling -- the power, the grace, the scale of this geologic force; the sheer beauty of this place. As the sun dipped low and the sky flared with blues, violets, and pinks, I stood by the edge of a meltpool and watched the ice change colors, too -- blues, violets, and pinks, not just reflected from overhead, but absorbed and re-emitted with a cold, glacial glint. The colors lingered well into twilight, as did I.

Not the sort of beauty that shows up in a photo. Not the sort of beauty that can be seen via tourboat or tourbus, nor felt on a short walk. The sort of beauty you earn.

Last of the sunlight, snagging on and in the ice

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And that's just the first of my adventures in Wrangell-St. Elias. More to come, 13.1999 million acres left to explore...