Woken up just after 7:00AM to bluebird skies again, I guess the thunder heads do blow out at night even if the sun doesn't set! Ate a quick breakfast, packed up, and started hiking at 9:00AM. We climbed up to 6400ft in talus and a little leftover snow. Kirk's plane flew over us while we were climbing the last push to the summit, probably dropping someone off. We reached the pass at 2:20PM. The views were incredible! Puffy white clouds were developing into darker ones so we didn’t linger very long. However, the start of the descent onto the glacier was the proper angle for a small avalanche so we traversed the first 100 yards one person at a time. The snow was super rotten so everyone was flailing in the middle of that first descent.
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| Climbing to the pass |
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| The pass in sight! |
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| At the pass |
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| Reached the pass! |
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| At the pass |
Eventually we had everyone down onto the flat glacier. There were rivers and lakes under the snow along the edges of the glacier so we moved out towards the middle where we could feel the solid ice under our trekking poles when we pushed them through a foot or so of snow. Kirk had flown over that small, mellow glacier many times and said it didn’t have any crevasses; Matt also studied satellite imagery of the glacier and didn't see any cracks so we figured we were good, although we let the experienced glacier travelers lead. The clouds continued to gather and grow darker but we were making our way down. We eventually reached a moraine near the snout of the glacier at 5:00PM. As soon as we stepped off the glacier we saw, not 20ft from where we stood, a 30ft drop into rock. Good thing we didn’t go there!
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| Dropping down from the pass |
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| Walking down the glacier |
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| Glacier walking |
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| Surprise glacier face |
The clouds moved in above us, fogging up the pass and upper glacier. We felt very fortunate to be off the pass and off the glacier before the fog obscured our visibility. We continued down the moraines below the clouds until we could spy the Jago River below. We decide to reach a large grassy flat at the foot of the valley right next to the Jago River for camp. We made our way down quickly, Matthew spotted two Dall sheep along the way. We reached our camp goal around 7:00PM. Rain started at this point so we set up the shelter first but by the time we moved on to our tents, the rain let up considerably. The wind is colder in this valley than the Sheenjek, blowing directly off the Arctic Ocean. Clouds marched up the valley and would throw us into and out of fog and an occasional Arctic Tern flew above us making a ruckus. Time for bed after a long day!
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| Dropping down to the Jago River valley |
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| Fog rolls in as we set up camp along the Jago River |
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