Warming temperatures are hastening the retreat of glaciers in Alaska. At national parks, managers are having to rethink their plans. How do they ensure the growing numbers of visitors do not disappear as the glaciers do? (via AlaskaBeacon)
no longer offers views of the glacier face. The center, built at the edge of Portage Lake with big picture windows facing the glacier, opened to the public in 1986; within a decade Portage Glacier had retreated out of sight, grounding on land on the opposite side of the lake.
At Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, a Tongass National Forest site that gets over 600,000 visitors annually, the Forest Service is going through its own process to upgrade facilities for what is expected to be an even bigger crush of tourists in a less-icy future. The situation is not as extreme as at Exit or Portage glaciers, but changes are coming, said Monique Nelson, a land management planner at the Tongass working on the project.
Because of melt dangers, in the latter part of the season, plane operations have to shift to a Kahiltna Glacier site about half a mile uphill, Loso said. That is as far as the planes can move, he said; crevasses and rock faces preclude any shifts farther uphill. That might mean a shift to Wrangell-St. Elias to the west, where Hubbard Glacier, currently the destination for only a few cruise ships, “is still huge and going to be calving ice for a long time,” he said., like the more heavily trod Exit Glacier trail, has been extended about 0.4 miles. That might seem like a minor distance, but it has made for some tougher travel to the park’s most accessible glacier, Loso said.
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