AdventuresNW
I step from the truck among 20 other cars, and an arctic wind knifes me within seconds. Weather always funnels like tides through this bottleneck, one of few gaps in the Alaska Range. My brow hurts with an ice-cream headache, and my hands are numb. I forgot my down jacket and borrow a flowery fleece from a friend who drove an hour from Fairbanks with her family in their vehicle. I’m now wearing socks inside mitts and a skimpy hat atop bulky upper layers, which, in the truck window’s reflection, makes me look pinheaded and decidedly fashion-challenged. We chose a cold day on purpose because lace forests grow in the depths of Castner Glacier only at freezing temperatures.
“You must be quiet in the presence of the ice,” Koyukon old-timers in Alaska used to say. “You must show it respect.”
The gloaming bathed the snout of nearby Black Rapids Glacier in azure color, which spread across the Delta River and the low sun struggled to part the milling scud. My wife and I smile when, igniting a lone summit, it succeeds. The air calms the moment we drop from the pullout into the bed of Castner Creek, the glacier’s outlet. Inky water rushes under ice panes crashed at an overflow; tracks hint that a snowmachine foundered here. The procession spread out ahead includes dogs, snowshoe enthusiasts, a kid towing a sled. Walking the well-broken granular trail is like plodding in sand, so I quickly warm up. Still, moisture from the balaclava stuck to my beard quickly rimes my eyebrows and lashes. A fogbow fragment glows at the base of decapitated peaks at our back. Ptarmigan tracks meander drunkenly between willows, past a rust-and-silver schist boulder of folded phyllo layers. An occasional imprint of fingered wings shows where the ghost birds took flight. Fox pugmarks flesh out the tale.
My fellow sightseers are elated yet subdued, and everyone seems relieved to have escaped their dens and the doom cycle of bad news and voting fraud rumors. It’s mid-December, winter’s pit, but we’ll gain minutes, if not composure, before long once the sun tilts higher again. Stepping off-trail for oncoming traffic, holding my breath while hikers pass, I sink up to my knees. We round a bend about a mile from the trailhead, and the glacier’s terminus looms suddenly. Its mouth is a whale shark’s toothless yawn, larger than expected. We enter, modern Jonahs, and it turns into a scalloped cathedral shading from aquamarine to lapis, hues sometimes seen in the Virgin’s mantle. Charcoal-gray grit veins walls encasing rocks and snarls of glass vermicelli here and there. Grist from the grinding of eons dusts the surface underfoot, though that remains slippery. Milky discs dapple it, air pockets arrested till spring.
It’s ten degrees colder inside. My ungloved fingers fumble with the camera. When the last shreds of light surrender to darkness, we click headlamps on. A strange, sacral atmosphere reigns, as in a museum or cathedral. “You must be quiet in the presence of the ice,” Koyukon old-timers in Alaska used to say. “You must show it respect.” Tlingits and Athabaskan Indians saw glaciers and river ice as both animate and animating the landscape. Glaciers housed fearsome creatures, giant worms or copper-clawed owls. Humbled, engulfed by it, the Castner cave makes perfect sense to me as some creepy-crawly’s lair. John Muir, a geologist-deist with an animist streak, stood hushed before land ice carapaces, “gazing at the holy vision.” He acquainted himself with glaciers and their work in the West and Alaska to come “as near the heart of the world” as he could. In the Andes, until recently, thousands of campesinos made pilgrimages to a special glacier terminus on an annual feast day, harvesting ice blocks ceremoniously. Peruvian peasants, who rightly implicated modern technology, blamed a drought on instruments that measured glacier-ice loss. Awe and the sacred, in general, always have carried notes of fear, the risk of being overwhelmed.
Clusters ooh and aah, together but alone, each steam-puffing social bubble percolating separately. Pale beams pick out random details. Enchanted voices echo dully, muffled, and ringing at the same time. One guy is ice-skating— it was on his bucket list, he tells someone. A thin ten-yard fracture makes me question the rink’s soundness. Farther in, sprays of foot-long hoar frost feather above us, serried sequins sparkle like transparent razor blades. A boy knocks down a glitter shower. His father asks him to stop. Exhalations in ice-age caves housing murals of lions and bears corrode the art. Visitors’ breathing in this alpine fridge builds it. In a likely future, however, such wonders could soon be history. Although the Castner retreats much more slowly than neighboring flows because of our species’ collective vapors, it thins almost as fast. This isn’t foremost an aesthetic problem, of course. Warm-blooded life in a glacial vault is as common and as comforting a thought as fallback Earths in outer space.
The whale shark throat tightens as the ceiling descends. I accidentally brush against hanging crystals. Gully rumblings of water in some deeper, even less knowable places sound ominous. Time to resurface. With our perspective reversed, human figures appear as black cutouts, backlit by the blinding-white exit. Step by step, Devil’s Thumb across the valley materializes inside a royal-blue archway. The plunging afternoon sun pinks its ridge—the light at the end of the tunnel.
Until that year, that very instant, with the end of the pandemic and Trump’s reign in sight, I’d never experienced or really grasped this metaphor born in an era of steam trains and gaslights. Post-election, the physical climate notwithstanding, with a vaccine at last having been issued, the promise of light, like beauty, kept us going. Perhaps there could be a world like the one we’ve already envisioned, one where people are not just disease bearers or faceless shapes. One in which glaciers and kindness, wildness and refuge, pikas and civil liberties, can survive.
In June 2022, with Alaska’s Interior thick with smoke from wildfires and sweltering in temperatures above 80 degrees, the Castner ice cave partly collapsed—its front portion was gone, while the back remained. Hikers still ventured there but called it “super risky,” hearing ice cracking and water and rocks raining from the ceiling. My first reaction upon reading about this was, “What if there had been people inside when it happened?” My second: “How can this crystal marvel be gone?” Then, naturally, “Why now?” We assume landscape features will at least endure for a human lifespan.
A recent coinage, “solastalgia,” describes the grieving for dear places that progress has obliterated. It covers habitat destruction ranging from development to flooded shorelines from thawing icecaps. I never knew the Castner’s crypt intimately or even for sure if the spiraling climate caused its demise, but I know snow and winter and ice, and I’ll miss them sorely.
In the pre-digital past, sand running through the fingers of a hand or an hourglass were poignant symbols. Snowflakes melting on the tongue would better serve our thirstier times.
Trained as an anthropologist but having worked twenty-five years as a wilderness guide and outdoor instructor, Michael Engelhard is the author of the National Outdoor Book Award-winning memoir Arctic Traverse, and the canyon essay collection No Walk in the Park, as well as of What the River Knows. He currently lives on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska, in a cabin among moose, lynxes, and porcupines.
