Glacier Landings
I am in the process of booking a high end flight-seeing tour for an upscale client. It's been a few years since I've been on one of these tours, so I've had to do a bit of research. There are some incredible new options out there for those of you who might want to do something amazing while visiting Alaska.
If you are on a cruise, there are a lot of built in options, especially in Juneau (land on the Mendenhall Glacier), Ketchikan (Misty Fjords National Park, so pretty it hurts), and Valdez. But many people think Denali, AKA Mount McKinley, being the tallest mountain in North America is the "it" flight destination in Alaska. I can't argue that... it is incredible, but there are some inherent problem associated with Mount McKinley. The main one is that the mountain is so tall that it creates its own weather patterns. It could be a clear, perfect blue sky day, and the mountain can be completely obscured by clouds. At least on a flightseeing tour, you can usually get above the cloud to see the top half of the mountain.
So, what to do? Well, I am fond of Girdwood, being a former resident. Girdwood is just 1-hour South of Anchorage. It is smack dab in the middle of the Chugach Mountain Range, which is heavily glaciated. There is a little flight tour operator there called "Alpine Air." In the good ol' days, when I lived there, they were still flying planes. But they have upgraded, and how, to super fancy helicopters, R-44's if you know enough to be dangerous...
They'll take you up to the top of a glacier and drop you off to enjoy a summertime romp on a dogsled. Or you can tour the Prince William Sound, landing on isolated coastline to observe wildlife and the pristine wilderness. If you have a few hundred bucks and a desire to see what very few have seen before you, check out Alpine Air at www.alpineairalaska.com
