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What's it like to flightsee Mt. McKinley? |
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No matter what your budget,
if weather permits, you won't
regret taking a flightseeing
tour of Mt. McKinley. From
the air, nature presents itself
on a scale beyond your
wildest comprehension.
Most flight tours approach
through the Great Gorge
of Ruth Glacier, one of the
densest collections of granite
walls in the world. You
enter over a boulder-strewn
labyrinth of treach er ous
crevasses seven miles long,
a mysterious jumble of rock
and ice resembling a bomb
blast's af ter math. Gravity
rams this great jumble of
earth and ice into the river
country below, obliterating all
in its path.
Soon, your plane is dwarfed
on both sides by a ten-mile
long phalanx of mile-high
towers of black-and-brown
granite. You stare in disbelief
at one of the world's great
granite mono liths, the
Moose's Tooth, when your
pilot tells you its 5,000-foot
face was once climbed solo.
What appear to be tiny fl akes
on the wall are actually
ledges wide enough to park
a tractor trailer.
The ice below is 3,700 feet
deep, some of it more than a
thousand years old. Were it
to melt tomorrow, you would
witness a spectacle twice
as awesome as the Grand
Canyon-a gorge a mile
wide and nearly two miles
high. |
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Exquisite ice formations
loom on the crest of these
walls. You are gazing at
blocks of ice the size of
shopping malls. The sun's
warmth often releases them
into a shower of rock and ice
that ricochets for a vertical
mile before slamming to
the glacier fl oor, sending
re ver ber a tions a dozen miles.
You see their jumbled debris
below.
You see fl uted ice faces so
sheer they resist the stabs
of a hardened metal ice ax.
For climbers these faces
rep re sent some of the most
challenging alpine ascents in
the world. For you they are
mind-boggling scenery-
when suddenly your pilot
tells you to look up. Just
ahead, you see the lofty
summit of Mt. McKinley.
Remarkably, North America's
highest peak lies less than 15
miles from its deepest gorge. |
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