On Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, AK

One of the fringe benefits of marrying a flight attendant is that, once in awhile, if she works a flight somewhere new, you can just join her for nothing.  A couple weeks ago I got a chance to do just that, when she worked a flight to Juneau, Alaska--to that quarter of the land where I had never before been.

The terrain reminded me of Washington, of home--yet the sight of those sea-planes lining the bay by the runway told me immediately that I was not anywhere close to home here.

Juneau is shockingly small, shockingly isolated, like you never imagine any U.S. city to be, let alone a state capital, of all things.  Yet despite its small size, you can still just sense how much bigger the rest of Alaska is beyond its immediate borders.  It really is the last frontier.  Did I say I'd never been there before?  Arguably, most people have never there before, not really.

Like I said, Juneau at first blush feels too Podunk to be a State Capital--yet each day in summer it is swarmed by at least 5 different cruise ships.  It is a fascinating contrast in extreme isolation and extreme consumerism, tiny population meets massive crowds, an escape at the edge of Western civilization that is daily overrun by the most grotesque excesses of Western civilization.

We had a full day, but only one full day, to explore Juneau, so we decided to hit up famed Mendenhall Glacier, to make the best use of our time.  The Glacier likewise provoked wild contrasts within me: first, a feeling of awe and wonder, at the sheer size and expansiveness of this ice sheet, couched in such resplendent, unspoiled wilderness, the ice tinged with bright blues that I didn't even know existed outside of cinema.

But then also a feeling of profound melancholy, at the realization that soon this glacier may well soon be remembered only by cinema.  For the Visitor's Center makes no bones about the fact that as recently as 1950, the Glacier covered its current location; and the Park Rangers you meet along the way are also upfront about the fact that the glacier came up to the first look-out; and that as recently as 1980, the glacier covered Nugget Falls (pictured on the right in the photo above).  For reference, it is about a 2 mile hike from the Visitor's Center to Nugget Falls.  By any calculation you could devise, that is an immense loss of ice.

Now, I knew full well before that Global Warming was in full swing: I've seen first hand the mega-drought in California, and have read all about the destruction of the Coral Reefs, the droughts in Australia, the mega-storms smiting the U.S. East Coast, the decimation of the Arctic Ice Caps.  But somehow the clear and rapid retreat of Mendenhall Glacier forced my attention more than ever.

And I'm of course complicit; I flew there on a carbon monoxide spewing airliner, did I not?  And all those tourists from the Cruise Ships--in those massive monuments to late-capitalist conspicuous consumption--they all, too, crowded the trails to see the Glacier before it disappears, even as their very gluttony is what is disappearing it in the first place.

So what can we do?  I wouldn't get rid of the National Parks, nor discourage visitors there, for all the world, for it is only by means of those places that humanity becomes all the more aware of the world that we live in, of the ecosystem within which we are enmeshed.  But that mighty glacier in all of its glory still melting into the lake haunts my memories, and is now the first image that pops in my mind when I hear of anyone who questions the veracity of anthropocentric Global Warming.