The Portage Glacier just outside Anchorage is a huge tourist attraction in the summer. In the winter, the lake at the toe of the glacier freezes over, and locals can skate to it.

Today, the glacier's remnant is beautiful Portage Valley, a 14-mile isthmus connecting the Kenai Peninsula to mainland Southcentral Alaska.

Continue down Portage Glacier Road another few miles — including a trip through the 2.5-mile-long Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel — and you wind up in the town of Whittier.

Continue down Portage Glacier Road another few miles — including a trip through the 2.5-mile-long Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel — and you wind up in the town of Whittier.

No one was hurt in the incident, which happened just after 4 p.m. on Feb. 10 at Portage Lake, Alaska State Troopers wrote in a dispatch posted online.

Other sites offer a cautionary tale. Annual visitation peaked in the 1990s at around 400,000 to the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center, southeast of Anchorage, with the Portage Glacier serving as a draw.

The terminus of Exit Glacier, seen on Aug. 5, 2018, is shown upslope from a sign marking the glacier’s reach in 2010. Retreat in the years since has been dramatic. (Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon) ...

Mendenhall Glacier is expected to melt away by 2050 — and more than 700,000 tourists this year are scrambling to see it before it's gone forever. By: Casey Mendoza Posted 3:30 PM, Sep 05, 2023 ...