Hike the Harding Icefield Trail

This trail doesn't ease you into anything. You start in a coastal rainforest thick with Sitka spruce, cross a few bridges, and then the climbing begins in earnest — and it barely lets up for the next four miles. You'll push through subalpine meadows where marmots whistle at you like disapproving gym coaches, scramble over rocky switchbacks with the Exit Glacier grinding away below, and finally emerge above the treeline where the world opens up in a way that rearranges your sense of scale. The payoff is the Harding Icefield itself — a 700-square-mile sheet of ice stretching to the horizon, punctuated only by lonely rock peaks poking through like islands in a frozen sea. It looks like another planet. This is a trail for hikers who want to earn something genuinely rare, not just another pretty viewpoint.