Story by Nicole

Boarding the train in the early-morning fog (Photo/Jason Rafal)

On Wednesday morning we caught the train to Seward. We had heard that the Anchorage-to-Seward train ride is one of the most beautiful in the United States, and it did not disappoint. The train winds along the ocean, through mountains, and alongside mountain lakes on its way to the small coastal town of Seward. The green, snow capped mountains next to the greenish, bluish gray water (it’s an odd color because it’s full of silt) is incredibly striking. Our ever-helpful and informative train conductor taught us a way to remember the five main specifies of salmon in Alaska using your hand:

• Thumb: chum salmon (it rhymes with thumb)

• Forefinger: sockeye or red salmon (use this finger to sock out someone’s eye and make it red; yes, kind of violent)

• Middle finger: king salmon (the longest finger)

• Ring finger: silver salmon (silver like wedding rings)

• Pinkie: pink salmon (pinkie is like pink)

He also advised us that no matter what we’re here to see and do in Alaska, we should never show anyone our king salmon.

Emergency train tools (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Nicole leans out of the train in an inadvisable way (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The train winds through the mountains (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The train continues to be absurdly photogenic (Photo/Jason Rafal)

The train ride is long and so beautiful that you actually get a little desensitized to the beauty. At first, everyone is taking pictures of everything. After a couple hours, though, there is a sense of “oh, it’s just another multi-colored mountain with glacial ice over a glassy mountainous lake, nothing special.” It is stunning, though. We highly recommend it.

Looking back as we arrive in Seward (Photo/Jason Rafal)

About three hours later, we arrived in Seward. A few words about coffee in Alaska: it’s huge. Apparently it’s the original hipster coffee state. They are obsessed with espresso, they started serving cold brew first, and everyone just expects there to be coffee everywhere. We noticed the espresso stands every few miles while we were driving to Talkeetna, and when we arrived in Seward, we noticed that the tiny building that housed our kayaking company actually had a sign on the door apologizing for not having coffee inside and naming a couple of options for disappointed, undercaffeinated visitors.

Espresso everywhere (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Apologizing for lack of coffee (Photo/Jason Rafal)

After we walked around Seward for a bit and got lunch, we caught the shuttle out to the Exit Glacier, which is on the edge of Kenai Fjords National Park. Exit Glacier is the only glacier that comes out of the Rhode Island-sized Harding Icefield into a valley instead of the ocean. Exit Glacier is losing about 130 feet of ice per year. As the glacier freezes, it crushes up rock, and as it melts, it pushes the silt out into the river with the water. Because of glacial melt and rain, the river has been running over the road to the park entrance, so they’re raising the road 5-8 feet right now. Our driver has been coming out here every summer for 12 years, and this is the highest the water has been. There has been retreating of the glaciers since the turn of the 20th century, but the past decade has been unprecedented.

A ranger-led tour was leaving the visitor center when we arrived, so we tagged along. Our ranger, Stephanie Larson, was a great source of information not only about the glacier, but about the landscape that a retreating glacier leaves behind. She taught us what a glacier is (a slow-moving river of ice), the four moraines represented (lateral, terminal, medial, recessionary), and a whole bunch of other things that you can ask Jason about if you’re interested. 

Two observations about Exit Glacier: it’s both impressively large and depressingly small. The amount of glacial loss in the last 10 years is crazy. Stephanie gently tried to make people think about global warming and the impact it’s having on these glaciers, but it’s hard to make people change.

Raindrops on large forest leaves (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Stephanie explains chattermark (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Exit Glacier (that big half-moon shaped cut at the bottom is only a couple of days old) (Photo/Jason Rafal)