Cirrus in the Last Frontier Journey to the Land of the Midnight Sun

摘要

Jagged peaks-some of them more than a mile high-line both sides of Alaska's Stikine River as we follow the winding waterway up a deep glacial valley. Torrents of opaque, robin's-egg-blue meltwater mark our path through what looks like an impossibly vivid, three-dimensional video game. Shimmering fields of massive ice blocks on the Le Conte Glacier carve deep trenches along the rocky valley floor as the irresistible force bulls its way to the sea. On the valley's nearly vertical rock walls, pine trees with branches stunted by hurricane-force winter winds defiantly cling to their footholds, and cascading waterfalls many hundreds of feet high pass by in a blur.