ADVENTURE TRAVEL : Going to Extremes at the Bering Glacier : Six Kayakers Find Beauty in Isolation Near Alaska’s South-Central Shore

My stomach quickens as our little Cessna rises suddenly, blown upward on a blast of wind coursing off Cape Suckling Hills several hundred feet below. We had been looking out of the scratched, plastic windows for grizzly bears and rabbits. We are that close. You can do that kind of thing in Alaska, with a bush pilot at the joystick who likes his job.

Hoping to distract ourselves from twinges of nausea, we marvel at the scene below. The low, hunchbacked hills that rise out of the Copper River Flats are carpeted in smooth, emerald-green grass. A simile involving this grass is trying to force its way into my consciousness but is blocked by queasiness. I am still working at it when Steve Williard, a consultant from New Jersey and one of my companions on this trip, grabs my notepad and writes, “Verdant as a golf course!” triumphantly in its margin.

We spend our weeklong expedition, our first trip to Alaska, competing to describe the Bering Glacier, the icy behemoth we have come so far to see. Back home, we have only the most mannerly of souvenirs from the Pleistocene Era: glacial boulders scattered up and down the East Coast, the Finger Lakes, the whole of Long Island. Here we will encounter not geological residue but the real thing--a remote, temperate, receding glacier 230 lonely miles southeast of Anchorage.

There are six of us on this July expedition--four college friends and two new acquaintances, all sallow professionals: a banker, a consultant, a marketing person, a broker, an accountant, a reporter. Looking for an untrammeled summer destination last year, we pulled advertisements for venturesome trips out of the backs of travel magazines and sent away for catalogues.

The catalogue that subsequently arrived from our outfitter, the Alaska Expedition Co., had a simple, alluring concept: sea kayak around a glacier hardly anyone knows about, let alone trammels, and have at your disposal four mountain guides, great food, kayaks and your very own base camp and bush plane.

Company owner Charles Allen added that we could set our own pace during the week, which is to say that laziness and cowardice were permissible. Yet we knew that we would be circumnavigating Vitus Lake, the large meltwater lake at the base of the glacier, within six days. That’s about 45 miles of kayaking, with most nights spent in 15-foot-by-15-foot canvas tents with plastic floors at various points around the lake. Our group chose this expedition unanimously.

*

One day earlier, we had flown from Philadelphia to Cordova, a small fishing town in south-central Alaska where Charles’ company is headquartered. It was the kind of town where you hear tongue-in-cheek witticisms like, “Come to Alaska, where the men are men and the women are, too.” We left for the glacier from the tiny Cordova airport, staffed by a man in blue jeans who told us stories about single-engine planes that vanish in Alaska’s trackless bush.

That bush has several celebrity glaciers--the Mendenhall, Russell, Malaspina--but the Bering is not one of them. And throughout the week we are aware of how very remote it is. It is 300 miles northwest of well-stomped Glacier Bay, where everyone else goes. The only visitors here are Charles’ clients. Otherwise there are just small groups of glaciologists who occasionally make the pilgrimage from Anchorage or Cordova.

As the Cessna crests over the Sucklings, we get our first view of the Bering Glacier. It is a massive, flat river of ice spread like vanilla cake batter over the Alaskan Coastal Plain. It pours down from the St. Elias Mountains in the north, its origin 120 miles uprange. We are flying above the glacier’s far western terminus. Charles dips the left wing so we can see with less landing-gear impediment.

As if it were skidding to a halt, the glacier’s end stutters into a blanket of thousands of crevasses that flash blue as we fly over. The folds of ice peel off the glacier, calving into Vitus Lake. Surrounding the terminus are tundras of debris scratched from the mountains as the glacier groaned forward over the millenium.

Charles brings the plane down on a slice of sand at the head of the Seal River, a ribbon of water that drains Vitus Lake into the Gulf of Alaska. From the air, the area looks like one of those dialogue bubbles in a cartoon strip, with Vitus as the bubble and the Seal as the little root running down to the speaker’s mouth, or in this case, to the Gulf.

We step out of the plane into warm sun and the sweet smell of wildflowers. Steller sea lions bob in the river, anxious and bewhiskered as old men. Steve holds aloft a palm-sized chunk of glacial ice he has plucked from the river. Because it has been compacted by thousands of years and millions of tons of snow, it is far denser than regular old refrigerator ice. Far denser and far more beautiful. It glitters in the sun like a crown of jewels.

We raft up the Seal in an Achilles outboard to the company’s base camp, five Quonset huts on a flat, four-mile-long island several miles from the Bering’s terminus. The huts will remain here through the summer. In September, Charles and his guides will break the camp down and fly out its 17 tons of equipment. There is a shower tent, a heated mess hall, sleeping huts and an outhouse. Clumps of lupine and fireweed are scattered about. There are no bears in sight, but bear tracks, big as dinner plates, are pressed into the frozen mud. We spend our first night trying to fall asleep despite the din of Arctic terns that nest near the huts.

*

The next morning we are in our kayaks by 9 after a meal of carbohydrates mercifully disguised as French toast, potatoes and corn muffins. Charles separates the married couples into different kayaks: People tend to fight less this way, he tells us. He is wrong. By midafternoon, Steve is vexed with my frequent pauses for photographs, and in the kayaks behind us, good-natured quarrels about pulling one’s weight continue apace.

Each couple is in a two-person Feathercraft sea kayak. Light, stable, ruddered, they are perfect for those who know nothing about sea kayaking. We take to the paddling technique quickly. As in so many other situations--marriage practically gallops into mind--the hardship is in the repetition. Shoulder muscles cry out after a few hours (we average six a day). The only exercise that prepares you well is swimming. Better make it the butterfly stroke.

We expect steady rains and mid-40s temperatures throughout the week, so we have rain gear, rubber boots and sweaters aboard our kayaks. But the sun shines down on us as we pull out into the lake, and the temperature will rise to the high 60s by day’s end. Some fluke of nature will give us sunshine for the entire trip. We arrive home with our arms browned right up to our new-found triceps.

Two guides accompany us as we kayak through the week. Two more remain at base but motor out to our field camps in an outboard each evening to bring us food and supplies. The guides are well-trained. They have to be. Capsize your kayak and within three minutes you could die of hypothermia. Wander too far into the alder bushes on the mainland and you might be attacked by a grizzly bear.

I ask head guide Doug Caylor if he has ever used his Emergency Medical Technician training on one of these expeditions. “Nah,” he answers. “The worst thing I ever encountered was a hypochondriac.”

*

While we paddle, a strange, unending ice follies is underway on Vitus Lake as the icebergs break apart. They calve from the face of the glacier and then continually calve themselves, a diminishing replication that litters the lake with thousands of bergs of all sizes. Some are as big as shopping malls.

Twenty thousand tons of ice collapsing into the water make a lot of noise. Each calving prompts a rush of similes from our group, most of them Steve’s: “Sounds like a winter thunderstorm!” “Sounds like gunfire!” “Sounds like a truckful of explosives dropped down an elevator shaft!”

Bergs the color of powdered doughnuts, robins’ eggs and blueberries enclose us in the lake as we paddle. Their tops are littered with scree--piles of loose, crushed stones. Melted water rains down from overhanging ice. Now and then a chunk breaks free of a crown and tinkles down the flanks of a berg. Altogether they sound like Christmas.

That night--and the next five--we camp on gritty spits of mainland that jut out around the glacier. Our meals are salmon steaks and stir-fried haddock and thick pancakes with fresh fruit, all prepared for us by the guides. Desserts are fresh peaches or homemade raspberry granola bars. Lonnie Williard, Steve’s wife, has brought a few bottles of red wine, stashed in the hollow of her kayak.

At night the plains beyond our tents seem to blend with low humps of glacial debris as they race north toward the St. Elias Mountains. The range looks ballerina pink in the twilight, cold and awesomely deserted. It has a bracing but exclusive beauty, and because you are human you do not feel a part of it. Many travelers come to Alaska for that sensation alone.

Each day follows a pattern of awakening, breakfasting, kayaking, gasping with admiration, lunching on chicken stew or haddock gumbo, and gasping with exhaustion. We are progressing around the eastern half of the lake. At night our field camps are set up by the guides, who also dig the trenches for our portable outhouses.

Most of the time we are paddling miles from the biggest icebergs, which nevertheless are visible in exquisite detail. It is not safe to be near them when they calve. But we paddle near the house-sized bergs and can feel the chill air coming off the ice and across the water.

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While scientists have visited it since the 1950s, the Bering Glacier attracted national attention only recently when it began menacing the Gulf of Alaska with the threat of ponderous icebergs. Right now, those icebergs are trapped in Vitus Lake by the Seal River, which is so thin that only the smallest melted bergs can squeak down it and out to sea. But if a high-intensity storm sweeps the area, it could open up the head of the Seal. Then the shopping-mall-size bergs could wash out into the gulf.

Carried west by offshore currents, they could drift within 48 hours into shipping lanes used by ocean tankers that head into the coast near Prince William Sound. The Titanic springs inevitably to mind. And because this is Alaska, so does the Exxon Valdez.

None of this matters to us now, however, because on Wednesday we take the outboard across the lake from our field camp and step out on the glacier’s jumbled moraine, or rocky debris. Just this once we will set foot on its fragile crust with its hidden fissures and canyons. Hapless hikers could break through the snow and plunge perhaps 50 feet into a crevasse: The surface is uncharted and unstable.

Doug hands out mountain climbing ropes and talks us through the ritual tying of the Swiss seat. He and guide John Sable made this identical climb one week before. They trade bewilderments on how much the ice has remade itself since then.

It is easy to see how that would happen. Here, the glacier is in constant motion. Beneath our feet in all directions, it has spread itself into fields of quartz-blue ice. A waterfall churns down a cliff of snow nearby. The glacier breathes, its winds alternately balmy and arctic. The sound of water crashing down inside caverns of ice that extend deep into the glacier drowns our conversation. This part of the Bering has a terrible, dignified beauty, like Satan in a dinner jacket.

We stop in at base camp Thursday. Although we have eaten and slept well, we are sore and want a respite from the Alaskan bush. We get it in spades. Charles has arranged a dinner of steak and Dungeness crab with drawn butter. We sit up late in the everlasting summer twilight and watch the mountains pink-up in the north.

*

On Friday, the penultimate day, we paddle toward the Bering’s main terminus, North America’s largest calving face. Earlier in the year, Charles saw three acres of ice calve off of it from 4,000 feet up. It impressed him so--15-foot waves, boulders of ice shot into the air like missiles, thunder like a truckful of explosives dropped down an elevator shaft--that he decided then and there that his kayakers would get no closer than two miles. “That area draws you like a siren,” he tells us, “but it’s dangerous.”

We kayak toward the face for three hours. The cragged terminus occupies most of our horizon and shines white as a bleached whalebone in the sunlight. We see that it is also pocked with huge blue gashes where gravity has ripped the bergs from the fabric of the glacier.

At just past noon, we are as close as we’ll get. Doug mother-hens us into a little cluster around him as if, siren-seduced, we will suddenly paddle madly toward the face and fling ourselves beneath the calving ice. But there is no calving just now. Everything is quite still.

These shivering cliffs of ice reach 100 feet into the air and stretch out for 15 miles. They look like England’s Dover cliffs, but are more formidable because they are frozen, and because so few see them.

Several times this century, the Bering has abruptly begun surging forward. But its current phase of retreat, now more than 20 years old, has it losing about half a kilometer of ice each year in the form of icebergs.

We feel a little frivolous among all this grandeur. We watch the wide, white terminus in silence. I hear only the relaxed breathing of Steve in the kayak seat behind me, and the occasional plosh of a paddle dipped in the water. The sun is out and a bowl of blue sky stretches over us.

*

Only 48 hours after we leave Alaska, the glacier, unobserved, calves fully half of its face. The beach where we spent Friday night will cease to be, and the moraine will have new indentations cut into its abused littoral. The Bering goes on with its work, acting, as 19th-Century glaciologists have observed, the part of God’s great plow.

We wanted to see such a storm of ice in action. But the Bering was oblivious to our wishes. It’s a glacier. It doesn’t care. It will likely be here until the next Ice Age, carving its awful imprint on the planet, birthing mountains of ice when our backs are turned, surging and receding as it damned well pleases.

GUIDEBOOK

Keeping Your Cool in Alaska

Getting outfitted: The Alaska Expedition Co. (P.O. Box 675, Cordova, Alaska 99574, 800-572-0980), a 4-year-old company, is the only outfitter leading groups to the Bering Glacier. Weekly trips are run from early June through mid-August. The price is $1,295 per person for a seven-day trip, including transportation between Cordova and the base camp, lodging (base camp, spike tents and other field equipment), food and all kayaking equipment. The fee also covers payment for the guides, although tips are warmly accepted. Clients should be in reasonable physical condition, although no previous kayaking or camping experience is necessary.

All expeditions leave from Cordova. Round-trip, advance-purchase fare between LAX and Cordova on Alaska Airlines, changing planes in Anchorage, is currently about $550.

For more information: Contact the Alaska Division of Tourism, P.O. Box E, TIA, Juneau, Alaska 99811, (907) 465-2010.