Day 2 of our Alaskan road trip in the year of our Covid Lord was prefaced by our arrival into the town of Valdez. In the preceding day, we had witnessed the unassumingly prepossessive Richardson Highway, whose empty lanes drew us out to the fishing hamlet of Valdez. But the crown jewel of this stretch of litter- and vista-strewn road was Keystone Canyon, about a few minutes out from our destination.

The road through Keystone Canyon: an undiscovered wonder

Here, the mountains and the hills gave way to jagged rock, smooth and jointed and blocky, all hunched over our little car like primeval gargoyles guarding a secret town. And although we were supposed to be getting closer to sea level, weirdly enough we were gaining altitude to get there. The town itself is better known as the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill which became the second largest oil spill in the history of the United States. If you, Dear Reader, have been tracking my dispatches from this frontier land, you will notice that we are seeing a theme here: an extraordinarily remote and breathtaking part of the world, slowly being destroyed and defiled by our negligence and greed.

And maybe this was what those lithological gargoyles were protecting. Theirs was an ancient way of life that, no doubt, would be subject to change from societal pressures. But the sheer rate and the bad faith in which this transaction with nature was being conducted necessitated a reproach. For us that day, our reproach was a crippling hunger as we rolled into town at 8pm having only sustained ourselves with "chicken in a can" for lunch (since there was a viral pandemic happening, all the restaurants were closed or needed advance reservation). Without the energy to cook, we settled on takeaway fish and chips which we devoured in a car. The smell of fried fish could still linger in the coming days ...

The next morning, we awoke in revivified spirits, and ready to bring more pointless banter along the ride (including debates on what constituted a mountainous dome versus a dome-shaped mountain; or whether the pandemic-forced takeaway services required a higher tip for working during this time, or a lower tip for the lack of actual customer service). It was interesting to learn too that Captain Cook was the first recorded white guy to reach the area, which he named Sandwich Sound. I'd like to think that it was because after a long voyage on the seas, the man was missing the taste of his sub of the day from his local franchised sandwich restaurant. But apparently it was named for the Earl of Sandwich, who himself received the title from King George for being the most gluttonous member of the royal court (don't quote me). It's pretty impressive though that this English fella would have been one of the first in the world to have set foot in places as different as Alaska, Hawaii, and Australia. Imagine what his stories to his Instagram followers would be like. They probably wouldn't even believe the geography and wildlife he saw.



 Today's activity was another glacier hike, this time up the Worthington Glacer. As glacier's go, this one was a featherweight, or maybe it was one of the first to go in this episode of the anthropocene. Our shoes had somewhat dried overnight, but ten minutes into the snowed in hike, we were once again feeling the familiar sensation of Not Feeling. A strange sense of being, this. You knew you were supposed to be feeling something, and your brain was sending electrical signals somewhere. Like driving past a stationary car that was rocking back and forth on a shopping centre carpark at night, you knew something was happening, but you didn't know exactly what.

Spot the Australian in Alaska

 Dylan had actually done this hike last year when the snow had melted, which due to the steepness of the hill required several switchbacks apparently. We thus relied on him to pick out a trail through the thigh-deep snow, but that's like asking a group of children what the best colour in the world was. In the end, we just went vertically up the hill in our snowshoes, with little regard for where the gentler turns were. We got to the top of a crumbling ridgeline and made it to a viewpoint for a glacier. But even then there wasn't much to see due to the snow, only the faintest outline of blue glacial ice, like a woman showing a tease of side-boob to a teenage boy.

Sneaky glacial side-boob

 The return trip back to the car was another messy affair. As you can see in the photo above, there were members of our party who came in shorts. Now you may think that of course this would be the first thing I would point out, as I am nothing but a genetically weak homo sapien with no in-built leg insulating fibres coded in my DNA. But I am also big-brained, because my womanly legs meant that I had to wear day-old trackpants, and these day-old trackpants allowed me to slide on my buttock all the way down to the bottom of the hill, while others slipped and stumbled.

Are these skis, or snowshoes?

Home sweet home