When life gives you a coronavirus-ridden lemons, make road trips.

This was the wise advice passed down to me by my great-grandfather, who presaged the arrival of Covid-19 some millennia ago when he was still a wee tot drinking bat soup from the ancestral family cave.

Respect is due where due is respect, and I am the last person to disrespect the blood in my veins from whence I heralded where from. Family is love, and love is respect, and respect means aloha. That was from Lilo and Stitch 3 (2002). So when I found myself stuck in Alaska with the prospect of facing another 2-week quarantine in an 80s-themed hotel if I chose to leave the state, I hopped along with two workmates Ryan and Dylan, on a roadtrip loop through the state. What this has to do with Lilo and Stitch? Well that was also another adventure story filmed outside the Lower 48.

Day 1 of our road trip involved driving down from Fairbanks, close to where we worked, to the town of Valdez, whose name does not encourage the presence of banks, institutional or topographical, that are anything above fair. The road we were going to take was the stunning Richardson Highway, whose vistas are reminiscent of the Icefields Parkway in Banff/Jasper, with powder-coated mountains on every turn of the road, and steep rock faces on either side of the highway whose potential for rockfalls was not inconsiderable.

First moose of my life!

While people around the world bunkered down as Covid lay sneakily in wait for its second awakening, we made use of the open roads to zip down in our rental car admiring the view. I can imagine that at any other time while the sky was blueing and the snow was thawing that other tourists would be otherwise congealing the highways. But the roads were bare, and it felt like we were living in a post-apocalyptic frozen world where you wouldn't pass another car for several hours. Maybe the Covid gods were doing us a favour. 

But enough about Covid, and onto trash. Alaska has trash EVERYWHERE. It is such a shame, considering how beautiful the state is. Every pull out we stopped at for a quick photo was littered with strands of plastic and cigarette butts and aluminium cans that people must just throw out of their car windows. And the cars too! There are just random hunks of cars left on the side of the road, with no other destination for miles around. Why go to the effort of driving all the way into a random stretch of highway to dump your car, when you could just accumulate dozens of rusting cars in your front yard like what the locals do? It was a baffling phenomenon, and by the end of the trip, we were suspecting that having useless car parts in your yard was a local display of status. And if that was the case, then the richest people in Alaska were the ones with school buses, tractors, and even a rusted firetruck out the front of their homemade and definitely not-to-code shanty house. This state really attracts an odd assortment.

Onto the main part of this story is our journey to the Castner Glacier. We'd heard stories from other people from work about attempting this walk, even in spring, only to be turned back due to the ice and snow. To be honest, I was worried more about the potential for crevasses and ravines to fall through. But luckily climate change had taken care of that, and what was left was just a minnow of a creek (or so we thought!). The bigger concern was that in retrospect, this wasn't even a hike that was recommended by the public lands big dogs. Searching for information on the Alaskan Bureau of Land Management, I found this:


Yes that's right folks. NOT RECOMMENDED. And it was even a lie to think that you could finish the hike in 1/2 mile. We'd budgeted 1 hour for a return trip to the glacier, but only managed to make it back to our car after 3 hours, hungry but alive.

We were just weak. Weak antipodeans who had been softened by sun and sand. Any grit had long been baked out of us by summers spent sipping cordial by the pool. For this trip, we'd borrowed snow shoes from the Airbnbs Ryan and Dylan had stayed, and even with those unwieldy contraptions strapped on, our feet would just sink until we were up to our knees and sometimes even up to our waists in the white stuff. We realised that although there wasn't much of a glacier left, we were basically walking on snow that was being undercut by a wide river. And ten minutes into the hike, I in my summer socks and Nike Free running shoes was sloshing about in water that I couldn't even see. I could just feel a hint of a current brushing past one side of my foot and up the legs of my pants. And even the others in their waterproof hiking boots were soon stirring up the dormant foot bacteria that had gotten used to the dry and habitable conditions on the inside of their Gore-Tex linings.

HELP

Imagine doing this for 3 hours. And imagining our demoralisation after seeing another group made of 10 year olds and their chaperone bouncing up in down in the snow with no trouble, like Legolas dancing at the local elven ballroom. I too used to be lithe like them. But I chose the dark path, the way of the carbs. And clearly the way of the backstabbing snow.

I don't think I can ever trust snow again. It hurt me bad in ways irredeemable. Every step could either land in solid footing, or straight through to the water. From this point on, I lumped snow in with all the ex-wives and ex-girlfriends that ever deceived me. This is how climate change gets back at us humans. You can have your glacier, I just want to finish this hike with ten toes!

We finally made it to the ice cave, after back-tracking several times and then stepping in the footsteps left behind by those damn little elves. It was unfortunate that the water level inside the cave had risen--we had been told that in deeper winter, you could actually walk far in to the cave with a torch. The floor would apparently freeze over, but you could still see the water rushing beneath it.




At this point, I wasn't gonna complain. I'd seen my second glacier. Paid my respects to the church of the climate change gods. And now I just wanted to return to the warm comfort of my gas guzzling car.

I wish I could say the return trip was just a simple case of retracing our steps, but that would have meant re-dipping our frozen toes into the frigid water (which maybe would have thawed the poor things). So we sort of tried a different route, and was sort of successful with finding a path. But we still waded in unknown territory.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... yep the shame is still mine.

Taking turns in testing out the waters (literally)

Oh nice. Water you could actually see.

And the unfortunate thing was that the rubbish followed us all the way in that (seemingly) pristine landscape. We found USB cords, camera batteries, a single expensive hiking boot, and a wooden shawl all discarded around where we were. Remember, there was no path we were following, so for those items to have gotten where they are ABOVE the snow makes me really sad to think about what we didn't see. We humans are the worst. We deserved what we got.

Still a happy chap enjoying all the bountiful (and treacherous) snow