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Breathtakingly blue walls shimmer inside the "Glacier Behind the Town."
There are scant few places where you can experience every stage of the water cycle at once. But there’s magic in the Mendenhall Ice Caves, where water runs over rocks and under frozen bright-blue ceilings inside a partially hollow glacier.
Images of the caves circulate the internet with such captions as “otherworldly” and “surreal.” The Mendenhall Glacier is a 12-mile-long glacier in the Mendenhall Valley, only 12 miles from downtown Juneau in southeast Alaska. The glacier originally had two names: Sitaantaagu (“Glacier Behind the Town”) and Aak’wtaaksit (“Glacier Behind the Little Lake”). Inside the glacier are the stunning blue ice caves, accessible only to those willing to kayak to the edge of the ice and then climb over the glacier.
Know Before You Go
The Mendenhall Glacier can be seen from the visitor center on Mendenhall Loop Road. From there you can take trails to the ice caves. A guided tour is recommended to make sure the caves are accessible and secure, as they are known to melt and cave in. Ice cave tours usually run from July to September. The glacier is federally protected as part of the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area, a unit of the Tongass National Forest.
Content originally created for Atlas Obscura.
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