Happy Canada Day! Thomas is a couchsurfer that lives in Anchorage, we had met up a few times in town for lunch and finally got the chance to do a backpacking trip together. We headed out of town after lunch on a Friday afternoon. Our destination was the Talkeetna mountains, we wanted to complete a variation of the Bomber traverse. Thomas drove us up to the trailhead only a couple hours from Anchorage.
We started off in heavy overcast skies, and followed a trail up the valley. We soon broke off from the trail and headed towards an old mine, most of the way up we were rock hoping across large rocks the size of a kickball, sometimes bigger. Once we got up to the top of the pass we found a few sets of tracks, and a couple rock cairns marking our way. We climbed up to another pass, and then eventually stood above a large snowfield at the foot of a glacier. We started to descend the snowfield and it was very wet, slushy, slippery and steep. I immediately decided a glissade was in order, ran forward and then plopped on my butt and started to shoot down the hill. Thomas followed, and we were at the bottom in a few minutes. We crossed the snowfield and then saw a house sized rock with a giant red arrow pointed on it. We could not have asked for a better sign than that! We climbed up the rock field and were soon greeted by the sight of the snowbird huts! The old snowbird hut was built in the 70’s and was a half down structure on a platform, sort of like a flying saucer. The new one looked like a swiss style building with windows and porch, cedar shingles and pretty red trim.
In the hut we were greeted by Cindy, Harry, and another couple. All 4 of them were there to work on completing construction of the hut. The hut is built and maintained by the Alaska Section of the American Alpine Club, check it out at www.snowbirdhut.com. Cindy and Harry have done a majority of the work and fund raising for the new hut. We enjoyed the amenities of the hut especially the kerosene heater and nice dry bunks. The next day Thomas and I offered to stay for a few hours and help with construction. Harry asked if we would mind starting to dismantle the old hut. We were given a couple hammers, and a crowbar and we began the demolition work. We tore out all of the old bunks, tables etc. We found several old artifacts including magazines, toothpaste, and clothes from the 70s and 80s. After our work was done, we set off for our next destination, the Bomber Hut.
The weather was worse than the day before, there were so much fog in the air we could only see about 200 ft in any direction, so using my GPS, there were no trails either, we worked our way down into the next valley. After several hours of route finding through jumbled rocks, alder bushes, marshland, several river crossings and even a black bear sighting, we arrived at the Bomber Hut. The bomber hut is much smaller than the snowbird, and much older. There is no heater, and is the size of a tool shed, we didn’t care since we were the only people there and were happy to get out of the rain. There was an interesting collection of comic books and a very entertaining log book. The log book had myths about a nearby hot spring, yeti, mastodons, and “recovering nymphomaniacs about to fall off the wagon”. Thomas spent a couple hours reading it.
Around 8:00PM someone came bursting through the door, it was Lewis! He had decided to try and catch up with us that morning, so he first went to the snowbird hut, and then on to the Bomber hut to join us. The next day after contributing our own tall tales to logbook. The weather was yet again, rainy with low cloud cover. We headed straight up onto the Bomber glacier, which was wet and slippery, we slowly made our way up to about 5200ft, where the B29 bomber wreckage was located. The bomber had crashed there in 1953, 4 crewmen died in the crash, 6 survived. The wreckage was left there as a memorial to the deceased. After taking a few photos and inspecting the variation portions of the plane strewn across the glacier, we continued upwards, and climbed up over a mountain pass, and then back down towards Reed lakes. The other side of the pass was not glaciated, but it was snowy and rainy and again there was no trail so we had to continue to rock hop a couple thousand feet down to the lakes and we finally got on a trail. From there it was a 4 mile hike out on trail, which we thought would be easy. Unfortunately due to all the rain, the trail was slick and rainy, so no relief yet. Finally we arrived back at the parking lot, and just as we did the sun came out.
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