The Largest Glacier Accessible by Car in the United States
By Emma Corby
Emma’s Rating: 😎😎😎😎😎
Last week, Ben and I went to visit Matanuska Glacier. This glacier is right off Glenn Highway, which the Matanuska River runs next to, and on the way there, we even saw a few groups of people ice fishing. This glacier is roughly one hundred miles northeast of Anchorage, an hour outside of Palmer, Alaska. Even from the highway, the glacier looms into sight. However, the experience of walking around on the glacier is completely different than just seeing it from the road.
The only way to visit this glacier is by either getting a special permit or booking a tour with Glacial Tours. Since permits are usually used for backpacking across it, Ben and I opted for the tour. We were unaware of this opportunity until a friend told us about a deal for Alaska residents. Usually, this tour is $150 per person, but for anybody that is an Alaska resident or that serves in the U.S. military, tours on the Matanuska Glacier are only $50 per person. Four tours go off a day, starting at 10AM, 11AM, 1PM, and 2PM, and each tour lasts for about two hours.
Up until that day, walking around on a glacier for two hours was always a “what if” for me; it seemed too cool to be so easy to do. Our tour group was about ten people, mostly Alaska residents.Once we had all arrived, our tour guide already had any extra equipment that we might have needed. She strapped all of our boots with spikes because, after all, the glacier is made entirely out of ice, which is just a slip-and-fall waiting to happen. The spikes prevented unintentional sliding.
Once we were on the tour, though, there was plenty of intentional sliding. A glacier is, essentially, Mother Nature’s endless supply of natural slides. Any time there was a choice between a steep decline or a long and wavy path to walk the long way, our tour guide always gave us the option of sitting down and taking a ride down the steep option’s ice slide. I took every sliding opportunity that was given, and there was an eight-year-old on our tour that discovered even more. He always found his way back.
Along with ice slides, there were also all sorts of ice caves on this tour. In this photo, I’m in the widest part of my favorite one out of all the caves we explored (although we were given a warning that claustrophobics aren’t a fan of this one and could opt out). This ice cave was about twenty yards long, and these two walls were only a couple of feet from each other at the widest points. Thankfully, ice is slippery, so nobody got stuck while they were squeezing through. It was a bit freaky in the middle of this cave, though, when it was almost completely dark.
The caves, crevices, slides, and 700-year-old chunks of ice made this tour surreal. As the largest glacier accessible by car in the United States, the Matanuska Glacier is 27 miles long and four miles wide; obviously, we could only cover the slightest fraction of it. We walked about two miles around the glacier with our tour guide stopping every few minutes to tell us all about the ice and the structures it naturally forms. At one point, we found a small hole with melted glacial water, only about six inches in diameter. Our tour guide encouraged us to take a sip of it, saying it’d be the cleanest water we’ve ever drank.
Matanuska Glacier, because it is a glacier, is frozen year-round, making the tours available year-round. I wouldn’t have ever known about the tours, and I’m not typically a “tour person,” but this was an incredible experience. We were given enough freedom to explore on our own, and the tour guide acted more like a leader of a group, showing us where the trail was, than a strict tour guide. Ben and I will definitely be going back in the Summer to compare the experience with the Winter, and if you get a chance, I highly recommend doing the same.