There are no roads in Kluane National Park, no easy way to see the glaciers and peaks reaching nearly 20,000 feet…except by taking to the air. So I am taking the ‘Grand Mountain Tour’ with Sifton Air who specializes in giving travelers a bird’s eye view of one of the greatest wilderness areas in Canada. The pilot, Taylor Morrison, looks too young to drive, let alone fly, but he proves to be skilled and knowledgeable in the mountains.
We take off from Haines Junction, flying north and west with Kloo Lake on our right and the turquoise blue of Kluane Lake ahead. A banked left turn takes us up the Kashkawulsh River valley to the great Kashkawulsh glacier with its precisely defined dark moraines striped against the white glacier ice. Into the heart of the St Elias Range, Mount Logan the highest peak of all is mantled with wisps of cloud in the distance before we bank left again over ice fields and across to Dusty Glacier which tumbles in part over a 500 foot high icefall into the Lowell Glacier below. It’s a heavenly, other-worldly maze of peaks, ridges and glaciers.
Down the Lowell Glacier to where its snout disintegrates into Lowell Lake with icebergs floating clear from the ice edge. Finally a turn north up the Alsek River valley and back to Haines Junction which seems lush and tropical after the ice kingdom we have been flying over for the past 80 minutes. I am left with a mesmeric collage of images: serrated arêtes with glacier ice hanging from their walls; glacier crevasses filled with meltwater of the most vivid blue; sinuous moraines reflecting the flow patterns of the glaciers; meltwater rivers braided into hundreds of channels each reflecting the sun.
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