Another One Off The Bucket List

Hi, All:

In light of the fact that the Alaska experience is coming to an end, we're trying to push through all of the blog posts we've collected in our back pockets the last few weeks.  We apologize for the onslaught of posts, but we wanted to make sure to get these out there so the documentation of all our experiences is contained in one neat location.

As you may recall, one of our goals for the bucket list was to go on a backpacking trip through Crow Pass (near Girdwood, where we used to ski in the winter).  Steve satisfied the backpacking goal last weekend at Red Shirt lake.  But a few weekends ago he also got the opportunity to hike, though not backpack, part of Crow Pass.

Steve headed out to Girdwood with Rebecca, Henry, and Alex on Saturday morning.  They began the hike to the pass, which goes along an old mining trail still strewn with mining equipment.  Indeed, the Crow Pass trail is also the historic Iditarod supply route!  After starting the trail with a fairly steep incline and a few (minor) river crossings (more like creek crossings), the land levels off at the top of the pass and you walk by a beautiful lake.  Immediately after the lake, you come upon this sign:

Although the Crow Pass hike is 26 miles in its entirety (in fact, there is a marathon running the pass every year!), the hike to the pass is only about 5-6 miles.

One of the coolest parts of the hike is how close you get to a glacier.  If we had climbing equipment (and were willing to lug it the 6 miles) we could have gone out again for another day of ice climbing.  And if we had brought a tent, we could have camped on the glacier.  Sadly, we did neither.  But Alex had his awesome camera and got some pretty sweet shots of the glacier as we sat around eating and chatting.

Anyway, that was our hike up to Crow Pass.  Although we didn't backpack it, and so we can't consider it a total cross off the bucket list, I think this would suffice as at least a partial strike off the list.  And maybe the backpacking from this past weekend finishes the line.

Hopefully there will be more posts to come in the final days here; stay tuned!