An Icy River Runs Through It

It was about three weeks after winter solstice, a time of year when Turnagain Arm seems to glow from sunrise to sunset in weak, orange light. I hovered in my helicopter in the middle of the fiord only a few miles off the Kenai Peninsula coast. A river had formed with the falling tide, draining the mud flats and allowing the temporary high ground to frost over. It was a detailed, textured landscape of countless ponds, ripples and ridges. It would vanish when the tide returned.