Up Close with Ice: A Portage Glacier Adventure from Anchorage

You step off the shuttle into an air that tastes faintly of metal and cold water — the Chugach Mountains crowd in on both sides, snow still pinned to their upper flanks even in midsummer. The lake is a scatter of blue and white: bergy bits the size of pickup trucks drift past the dock while a stranger’s camera clicks and a park ranger points at a distant lip of ice that looks as if it might fall any second. The sound comes after the first sense of scale — a thunder that makes people glance at one another and, for a moment, forget how to speak.