Ice, Ice Baby

Break-up came freakishly early this year.  That means that daytime temperatures have soared into the 40s, so much water is dripping off my roof it sounds like rain, and the parking lots are slushy-slick death-traps that refreeze every night.  Naturally, we have to go outside.

The local ice parks opened in February.  We made our annual visit, but since I'm the only one who really seems to enjoy going we didn't get season passes this year.  We slid down the slides, spun in the spinners, and dutifully admired the statues.  As is tradition (apparently, though I didn't vote on it), there was at least one kid who protested against being outside and had to be dragged around on a sled from slide to slide.  Ah, memories.

I love these ice-bowls.  They're basically for corralling small children, who can't make it up the slick walls.  They also work on bigger children.

For scale.

Porta-potty, Alaska style.

When Mom overrules you and makes you play anyway.

We have some very adventuresome friends who are hellbent on enjoying their time in Alaska.  They recently made the 13 hour drive up the Dalton to Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean. (They're bold; I'm too nervous to make that trip during the winter like they did, and I'm certainly not doing it now when all the roads are turning to mush. I'm planning to make it at least to the Arctic Circle this summer.) They also visited Castner Glacier, which is not only safer but more local (within three hours of Fairbanks) and I was inspired to follow suit.

With less than a day of serious planning, we threw our snacks, snow gear, and a sled in the van and headed south to Delta Junction. It was gorgeous out.

We pulled off the road into a makeshift parking lot (a thoughtful snowplow had shoved the snow back twenty feet or so) and piled out.  After a steep initial drop from the roadside, the trail leveled out.  I say "trail" but I mean "the two foot wide path of packed snow that you really shouldn't step off of." If you stumbled or were bumped or, heaven forbid, were stupidly trying to be polite and let someone else pass you...well, you were thigh-deep in snow.  Which I may have been one or five times.

 After a mile, Castner Glacier looms out of the snow.  When we got there kids were sledding into the glacier itself.  For all its remoteness, it's a pretty popular spot; we saw around twenty other people and various dogs during our hike.  It's pretty easy to understand why.

Castner Glacier is an actual flippin' glacier and YOU CAN WALK INTO IT.  *Squeee!*  During the winter, anyway, since during the summer there's a river flowing out of it and the melting ice can be dangerous.  The ceiling is blue ice but the walls are crystal-clear, and you can see the sediment trapped in the ice; it's almost like a giant piece of gold-bearing quartz.  The floor is solid ice in most parts and the further you walk in the crazier the ice crystals get.  We went a couple hundred yards.  We could have gone further, but the ceiling got a little too low for Rick with the carrier, and we also hit the first bit of open water--we heard it long before we saw it.

It. Was. Amazing.

 

Like I said.  Amazing.

As per the universal laws when an experience has been freaking awesome, things had to balance out. Somewhere on the snowy mile between the glacier cave and the van, I lost my phone.  I was taking pictures, and while returning it to my pocket with my fat-gloved hands, I didn't get it all the way in the pocket and it slipped to its death in the two feet of snow on either side of the path.  I didn't realize it until we got back to the van.  Immediately I set back along the trail, checking every hole.  Rick joined me ten minutes later.  He ran the trail to the glacier and back, then went back over it again with a shovel and a walking stick, literally probing every hole and mentioning it to everyone he passed.  I prayed.  He prayed.  We tried calling it, a desperate but pointless attempt forty miles south of the last bar of coverage.

Nothing.

I felt sick.  Not only had I lost my phone (I really shouldn't have an iPhone, I have a history), but all the trip pictures were gone, and my hungry kids waited in the van for an hour and a half while their dad and I looked for a 2"x4" needle in a huge snowy haystack. This trip, which I had been so proud of spearheading, I had singlehandedly thrown in the crapper.

Finally, we returned to the van.  We had done everything we could have done.  The phone was gone.  We had kids to feed, and a three hour drive home.  So we left.  Rick attempted to be supportive and comforting, but after forty miles of me apologizing decided antagonism was the best bet to get me out of my slump.  One of the kids, smelling blood in the water, offered her condolences for me "losing [my] favorite child." 

She has since been struck from the will.

Anyway, by the time we got to Delta Junction I was leveling out and accepting the inevitable.  We went to dinner at a roadside steakhouse and hotel.  Halfway through dinner, Rick got a call from one of our friends in Fairbanks asking if I'd lost my phone.  It turns out some guy had found my phone and texted our friends, freaking out the wife who didn't want to give out my information to a stranger without double-checking.  Rick took the stranger's number and called.  The guy told us to wait, he was 10 minutes out and would meet us at the store down the road.

Dude.  DUDE.  This guy had been hiking down to the glacier when he had seen something flashing in a hole in the snow.  He leaned over to look and there was my phone, flashing with a text message.  I remind you there was no coverage.  I couldn't receive or send calls or texts.  In fact, the text I sent during our search didn't arrive until I got my phone back in Delta Junction.  Rick and I had poured over the trail four times.

It was an honest miracle, and I don't use that term lightly.

I could have handled the news better (I might have thrown out a "I got my favorite child back, so suck it" at the previously offending child) but all was forgiven in the moment of excitement.  The guy, Stephen, let me give him a hug and refused a tank of gas for his trouble. It was a good reminder that people are generally good, one my increasingly cynical self really needed.

And, of course, we took a "holy crap, phone is back, day is saved!" selfie.  Because memories.