The Ruth Glacier flows about 40 miles out of the Alaska Range on the south side of Denali, North America’s highest mountain. Halfway down, it squeezes through the Great Gorge, a mile-wide trench of ice walled in by granite cliffs that climb 4,000 to 5,000 feet above the glacier’s surface.
Ruth Glacier and the Great Gorge in numbers
The figures behind the view are enormous. Across the Great Gorge the glacier is about a mile wide, and over roughly 10 miles it drops almost 2,000 feet. Measurements in 1983 put the ice there at about 3,800 feet thick, and a 2024 study estimated the full depth of the gorge at about 8,085 feet, making it the deepest gorge in North America. Strip away the ice and the canyon would be roughly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.
The ice is on the move too: the Ruth slides down the valley at around three feet a day, and parts of it are more than a thousand years old. The explorer Frederick Cook named it in 1903 after his youngest daughter, Ruth.
Moose’s Tooth, Mount Dickey and the granite walls
The gorge is lined with some of the most famous rock in Alaska. On one side rise the spires of Moose’s Tooth, Broken Tooth and Bear Tooth, granite towers that look like a row of animal teeth when seen from far to the south. Opposite stands Mount Dickey, whose granite face is described as the highest in North America, around twice the height of Yosemite’s big walls.
These faces draw serious alpinists, who set up climbing camps on the glacier to tackle technical ice and rock routes on Moose’s Tooth and its neighbours. Avalanches regularly pour off Mount Dickey after fresh snowfall or when the morning sun warms the slopes, and the debris can fall a vertical mile.
Crevasses and the Ruth Ice Fall
From a distance the Ruth looks like a smooth white road, but the surface is broken by crevasses wherever the moving ice stretches and cracks. Below the gorge lies the Ruth Ice Fall, a zone of about ten square miles where the glacier tumbles and shatters into a maze of blocks and fissures that is virtually impassable on foot.
Like every glacier in Denali, the Ruth also works as a conveyor belt for rock. Ice grinds the bedrock into fine glacial silt, which meltwater carries downstream, and leaves larger debris in moraines along its edges and at its foot.
How to see the Ruth Glacier: flights from Talkeetna
There are no roads anywhere near the gorge, so almost every visitor arrives by air. Air taxi operators based in the town of Talkeetna hold permits to land ski-planes on the Ruth Glacier, and a typical flightseeing tour lasts about 90 minutes, with glacier views starting around 20 minutes after take-off.
Many tours land in the Don Sheldon Amphitheater, on snow at about 6,000 feet, with Denali roughly 20 miles away. The amphitheater is named after the bush pilot Don Sheldon, who pioneered glacier landings for climbers and scientists in the 1950s and built a small octagonal mountain hut there before the land became part of the national park. Passengers usually get a short walk on the snow before the plane takes off downhill.
Summer is the main season for flights, and the weather decides everything: book with some flexibility, since cloud can ground planes for days. Travelling on the glacier itself, beyond the landing area, is a job for roped teams with crevasse-rescue skills or a professional guide.
Related reading
- Alaska’s Changing Glaciers: A Guide to the Historic Photo Pairs
- Valdez Heli-Skiing: H2O Guides in the Chugach
- Aurora from Norway, Alaska and Orbit
- Five Alaskan Landscape Photographs: Mountains, Water and Northern Light
- Afterglow: Skiing Written in Light
- Teton Gravity Research’s Himalayan film
- Briksdalsbreen in Norway
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