HaveKidsWillTravel

Getting close enough to touch and walk on them, though, is a rare thing – and the Exit Glacier, dropping from the massive Harding icefield near Seward is the best chance we’ve had to really see a glacier up close and personal. Walking across the brittle talus of the moraine, through the cloudy meltwater streams, feeling the cold catabatic winds and touching the clear, hard ice of the glacier tongue itself brings it to life in a way that no amount of picture-postcard scenic photo-ops are ever going to.

This is what a Glacier feels like.

In fact, it turned out that we were passing right by – on the shores of Cook inlet, our way down the Kenai peninsular – on one of the lowest tides of the summer, apparently perfect time to go digging for razor clams ourselves.

We stopped at the nearest town’s supermarket, and – in a whole aisle dedicated to clamming equipment – picked up a ‘clam gun’, basically a long metal tube that apparently you plunge into the sand, cover an air hole with your thumb, pull it out and reveal the clams below.

We weren’t the only ones to have read the tide tables, though, and the Clam Gulch campground was close to capacity with eager clammers like ourselves, anticipating the morning low tide. By 10am, the air was electric as we trooped down the cliffs to the beach. This part of Alaska gets some of the biggest tides in the planet, and the sea had dropped a good 15 feet from where it was the previous afternoon – exposing a good hundred meters of muddy, sandy ocean floor.

The beach is cold and muddy, the wind biting, and the water freezing – and across the inlet stand 10,000 foot tall snowcapped volcanoes. But we’re not here to frolic in the sunshine – we’re here for some serious hunting and gathering, and with a few pointers from some locals, we got an idea of what to look for – really just little dimples in the muddy sand. The real trick, though, is to avoid the muddier bits, boot-sucking quicksand that really doesn’t want to let you go.

And sure enough, just as we were starting to figure it out, Evie fell over in the freezing, sucky mud and (mucky and damp in the cold wind), decided she was no longer having any fun. Everyone else decided their hands were going numb too, so headed back up the beach before they got hypothermia while I stuck around to make sure we had dug enough to command some respect back at the campsite.

But digging complete, the real work starts – washing and cleaning the things, and I had my work cut out making it through our catch. The foot of the clam is really the prize – a tender piece of seafood that is up there with a good scallop, the neck is kind of like a rubbery bit of calamari that is apparently best minced.

So while we can tick it off the list of quintessential Alaskan experiences – getting elbow deep in frigid mud on an open, windblown beach beneath glacier covered volcanoes in search of elusive molluscs, I would be more than happy to sell you a used clam-gun if you are in the least bit interested…