What a wild weekend! We were fortunate enough to get up onto the Denver Glacier, just outside of Skagway, for an overnight and some mushing on snow! We had a beautiful helicopter trip up and took a ride about a mile upglacier in a snowcat. We were able to mush our own teams and visit with some old and new friends.
It was quite a tease, though, and boy are we ready for winter training and racing. I've finally got some pictures for you all, and as you can see it was very white up there! It was extremely foggy and it was really almost sensory deprivation. Everything, including dog houses and buildings (always movable wall tents or arctic ovens) have to be white to reduce the melting of the glacier. I was told that we were on about 6 feet of snow, on top of anywhere from 200-800 feet of ice! It is a frozen river, so it flows anywhere from 6 inches to multiple feet into a Valley the chopper pilots call Paradise. We had an amazing time and hope to go back next summer.
We're back to work today and had some awesome tours. Not only was our A-team looking absolutely outstanding, but our B-team was doing exceptionally as well!
Above is the helicopter pad (on the left with the orange cones), the "toe" or end of of the glacier is in the right photograph. To the left is a view of Skagway from the air.
