Seward, Ak. June 18

Hello everyone!  We miss the beautiful beach that we were lucky to find with our friend Debbie's help, but we have to move on.  We drove to Seward and set up camp.  After lunch, we visited the visitor's center and drove through town which is lovely.  We found the Sealife Museum which was very informative and enjoyable.  Then we drove to our second Nat'l park in Alaska.  Kenai Fjords Nat'l is a park like we have never seen.  Ice stretches as far as the eye can see, interrupted by an occasional jagged peak.  This is the Harding's Ice Field.  It covers over half of 669,983 acre park and conceals a mountain range under ice several thousand ft. thick.  Named for Pesident Warren G. Harding, who visited Seward in 1923, the icefield is a relic from the last ice age.  It gives us a glimpse of when ice covered much of N America.  As the ice recedes, it uncovers glacially carved valleys that fill with sea water, creating the stunning fjords.  House-sized ice masses crash from tidewater glaciers into the sea, stirring up plankton that attract hundreds of hungry seabirds.  Long the coast, Earth's crustal plates collide head-on: the denser Pacific Plate slips unter the N. American Plate.  This drags the Kenai Mountains into the sea and deepens the Fjords.  It causes several earthquakes, too.  In 1964 the Good Friday Earthquake dropped the shoreline six ft. in 3.5 minutes.  Throughout the year storms drop hundreds of inches of snow on higher elevations.  Snowflakes compact into dense glacial ice and feed nearly 40 glaciers that flow from the icefield.  Rivers of ice, they creep downhill like giant bulldozers, carving out bowl shaped cirques and broad u-shaped valleys.  We visited Exit glacier, the only part of the park reached by road.  We got close enough to almost touch it.  We didn't see this, but large blocks of ice frequently calve from its face without warning.  We enjoyed reading about the history and walking the trail to the glacier.  Fantastic!