Lauren Jobe was skating on Portage Lake on Monday, Feb. 10, when she heard the glacier start cracking. She was about 80 yards away.
“I know they make noises, so I didn't really hear them as a warning sign that it might break off,” Jobe said. “I thought this might just be the noises that people say glaciers make.”
Soon, a couple of rocks tumbled off the top. And then, she said, a huge chunk of the glacier crashed onto the ice, shattering it and triggering waves beneath the frozen surface.
“I just skated for my life. It was pretty surreal in the moment. The adrenaline just kicked in,” she said. “The most frightening part was just like, ‘Am I just not going to be fast enough to get out of here?’”
Jobe and her boyfriend did get away. They sprint-skated to the closest land, a craggy outcrop between two lobes of the lake.
“The first wave had kind of hit right as I was jumping off of the ice from where we were, and a few seconds later, where I had jumped off was completely shattered,” Jobe said. “And then we just watched the waves go by.”
The two of them had backpacks with safety supplies. They used their rock climbing harnesses to climb over the crag to a more solid piece of ice. Two other skaters made it to land but couldn’t climb out on their own, and were rescued by nearby ice climbers.
That glacier calving wasn’t just a close call for Jobe. Last weekend, hundreds of Alaskans had flocked to the lake about an hour south of Anchorage to skate, bike, walk and sled the smooth surface. They were seizing the window of winter where the ice is thick enough to skate on, but not yet covered and rough with snow. There was even a rave with DJs on the ice last Sunday.
‘Would have been a national tragedy’
Luc Mehl, ice rescue instructor and avid ice skater, said the community should be grateful the calving happened on a Monday.
“If that calving event had happened over the weekend, it would have been so bad, and it would have been such a hard spot for rescuers to get, for bystanders to support, like the really worst-case scenario,” Mehl said. “It would have been a national tragedy.”
Mehl said it’s amazing no one got hurt, and he said this kind of close call is an opportunity.
“Something super scary happened to a bunch of people within our community, and so I think it's worth everybody just taking a second to chill out and think about, ‘How is this going to affect my future decisions?’” he said.
Mehl has a few safety tips for people recreating on ice. He said you should wear ice picks around your neck to use to help climb out of the water if you fall through the ice. Those cost about $10 at outdoor recreation stores. He said the ice should be at least four inches thick and people can measure that with an ice screw. Also he said to make sure you have a pack with supplies.
“I'm carrying a full set of spare clothes in a dry bag,” Mehl said. “I've got a first-aid kit. I've got a repair kit. Like all the standard Alaska stuff, right?”
He said he also carries a pair of surgical scissors to cut off frozen clothes. And he may carry a pair of shoes in his pack now, since that helped Jobe and her boyfriend climb to safety. He said wild ice skating Facebook groups can be a good place to ask about safety at particular destinations.
Look for cracked ice, keep your distance
Aurora Roth, an Alaska glaciologist, said spending time around glaciers without seeing a calving event gives many people a false sense of security. But she said calving events like this are a feature, not a bug, of glaciers.
“They are moving rivers of ice, and so they build up snow and ice up in the mountains, and that is flowing down, and that's the glaciers, this flow of ice,” she said. “And with that flow comes sort of cracking.”
When the cracked part is hanging off without support, Roth said, it falls. That’s what happened at Portage. She said it’s a natural process of glaciers and it had nothing to do with the crowd.
“Alaska Native people — particularly in Southeast, Lingít and Eyak people — have oral histories of glaciers being these alive beings,” Roth said. “And there's a reason that those stories talk about glaciers in that way.”
Roth also said this glacier is shrinking due to human-caused climate change, but that it didn’t cause the calving event.
She shared a few safety tips of her own. Watch out for signs of recent calving, she said, which could mean more events are coming. Those signs include chunks of glacier on the ice, a cracked pattern of ice near the glacier’s base or very bright blue on its face. Cracking sounds are also a clear warning sign.
Roth said she wants to remind people: “Just how special it is that we do get to recreate in these places, and to really appreciate that we do get to view these glaciers and these landforms.”
And, she said, you can still take in the beauty of glaciers at a safe distance. She can’t give an exact number for that safe distance, since she said it depends on the surroundings, but she said it’s best to stay several hundreds of meters away.
