Glacier View Area — Spring

Location: Mile 94 Glenn Highway — Near Victory Bible Camp
Date of Photo: April 18, 2020
Temperature: 52F
Current Weather: Partly Sunny

Camera Settings for photo

Image was made with my Canon 1Dx Mark II body and a Canon 24-105mm f/4.0 lens at 50mm at f/16 for 4-minutes at ISO 100 w/ a 3-stop hard edge GND & 10-stop ND & polarizer.

Image Description

This image was made in the “Glacier View” area of the Glenn Highway perhaps an hour or so before sunset time. I love the knife-edge ridges with spring snow. I wanted to get “something different”. So even though the wispy clouds weren’t moving much, I decided to make a REAL long exposure (four-minutes) to create that painterly sky pattern.

History and Information about this location

The “Glacier View” area is located north, northwest of Anchorage, it runs from Mile 89 to Mile 119 on the Glenn Highway. This is one of those “census-designated” areas. There is no post office, no stores to speak of. But there is the Glacier View School and the area has a population of just over 200 people.

The area consists of 450 square miles. 2 square miles for every person. Not bad.

At only 2 hours from Anchorage, I enjoy the area mainly because of my love of mountains. I can sit and stare at our Alaska mountains all day long. I guess someone might call it my “happy place”. Well, the Glacier View area has mountains in spades. The highway corridor rests along the edges of the mountains as it slices through the Talkeetna Mountains to the north and the Chugach Mountains to the south.

And these are not just your average, run-of-the-mill mountains. This plethora of monoliths run the gamut of volcanic geology. There are knife-edge ridges, vertical spires, craggy faces, ice fields, glaciers and countless angles and compositions one can search out. As I stare, my eyes are forever meandering over all of these nooks and crannies. And I smile and I relax.

A favorite spot for many in the area is Sheep Mountain. The wrinkled mountain has an extensive variety of shades of orange mixed with grey and purple. These colors, with the spring snow still clinging to just parts of it, creates an image of a Bev Doolittle abstract painting. One’s eye can wander over this landscape and find countless images hidden in the details. The mountain is known for attracting Dall sheep because of the natural minerals there—calcium and magnesium. It is also a huge gypsum deposit.