Salmon Glacier Crossroads

This is the truly awesome Salmon Glacier in the Boundary Ranges of the Coast Mountains in British Columbia. It is relatively easy to view from the Granduc Mine Road which climbs from sea level at Hyder in Alaska to this viewpoint. Although this glacier has shrunk considerably since I first saw it fifteen years ago, it is still an amazing sight.

The glacier flows from the high mountains on the horizon straight towards us, then splits and flows both north and south. The south branch (to the left) is miles long, but the north branch (right) withers and breaks up in a short distance.

The body of the glacier blocks the valley to its north and a lake, Summit Lake, forms there and normally overflows at the north end into the Bowser River. But beginning in 1961 the buoyancy of the ice and its decreased thickness caused the glacier to lift slightly and the lake rushed out underneath and down the Salmon River to the south. This catastrophic flood event is know by the Icelandic term jökulhlaup and now occurs most years.

So that is the crossroads—a river of floodwater crossing under a river of glacial ice.

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USA-Canada / Canada-British Columbia

Lat: 56° 10' 10" N
Long: 131° 4' 7" W

Elevation: 1113 meters

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Unknown / Undeclared.

Photographed with a Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR with a 15mm Canon fisheye lens, on a Nodal Ninja VR mount, Really Right Stuff ballhead, and Gitzo carbon-fiber tripod. Stitched with PTGui Pro 8.3 on a Macintosh Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, retouched with Photoshop CS3