Alaska Highway 1 runs from Anchorage northeast through Glenallen to Tok, a distance of 300 miles.
The following photos show some of the beautiful scenery along the way.
Almost all the rivers we passed had deposited huge amounts of silt. The spring thaws must make the rivers raging torrents. We saw large trees that had been swept downstream and deposited along with the silt. Even now with the rivers at lower levels, the current was very swift.
Absolutely beautiful country!
Highway 1 parallels the Kenai River for miles out of Anchorage.
Snow capped mountains in the middle of summer.
Matanuska Glacier seen from Highway 1.
Matanuska Glacier
are fed by snow; the weight of new snowfall squeezes old flakes into ice crystals that can grow as large as your head. When light pierces the compacted ice, red wavelengths are absorbed, leaving a ghostly blue glow. Only once-deep glacier ice emits the cold . You can see this bluest blue best at the bottom of a crevasse, or where are calving, or—more beautiful still—where they are melting as this glacier is doing.
Roe and Matanuska Glacier.
It seems I took lots of pictures like this, with the road stretching into the distant mountains. The distances are huge. You begin to think of 10 miles as a "short" distance when the next gas station is 50 to 100 miles away.
