When we arrived again in Homer by ferry, we headed straight back towards Seward where we still had the hike up to Harding Icefield.
On our 3 hour drive back, we made a small detour to the city of Kenai. We were surprised about the amounts of people on the beach and decided to take a look. People were standing deep in the water on the beach doing salmon fishing in a way which is called “dip netting”. It turns out that we were lucky and one of the major salmon runs up the Kenai river is just happening. A lot of Sockeye salmon then swim more or less along the shore to the mouth of the river mouths. No wonder a lot of people were pulling out Salmon in their nets in short intervals. The whole event looked like a festival: People fishing, people chilling in their camping chairs and in further back on the beach, a lot of folks set up their tents for spending more than just one day fishing.
After that impression we continued driving until we reached the Exit glacier again. But this time we headed up the 6.6km long and & 1010m high hiking trail to Harding Icefield!
The hike was spectacular along the right mountain side of Exit glacier. We were also surprised by two bears running down the hill between bushes just a couple of meters from us. At the top of the trailhead we enjoyed a really nice panorama over this really huge Harding Icefield feeding several glaciers like the Exit, as well as Holgate tidal glaciers we’ve seen a week ago from the boat.
As we started the hike rather late at 2 pm, on our way back we enjoyed the nice, warm light of a lower sun. Doing hikes in the evening is not really a problem here since sunset is only around 11 pm nowadays!
Back down in the valley we decided to head for Seward to eat some nice seafood and then drive on north towards Hope, our next destination!
