Castner Glacier Adventure

High today: 63
Low today: 35

My goal of this day was to get Aviva and Jud to a glacier, special request by Jud. I was going to take them to the Gulkana glacier, since I am familiar with that one, but decided to try to get to the ice cave at the Castner glacier, mentioned to me by Dea, since it was on the way south. She skiied it with a few others about a month ago. Sounds like a plan for next winter!By the time we got to Castner Creek, (at this point we were moving at a very very slow, relaxed pace of life getting out of Fairbanks..), the snow was really coming down and the mountains were mostly obscured which was a bummer. I was still very excited about the snow and was wondering why I didn't think to bring my skis (there really wasn't THAT much snow, but one could wish). We zig-zagged along the creek until we finally found the ice cave at the base of the glacier that was supposedly only a half mile from the road. I think our swiggling made it more like 2 miles.. I wasn't super impressed with the glacier at first, but it did have that cool cave and even though it was small, it was still a glacier. There weren't any crazy crevasses or anything... Next time I'll go back to the Gulkana, although I'm glad we didn't attempt it this time. It would have taken a much longer time, and the Gulkana was still completely covered in snow which makes it unwalkable (unless you're dumb) this time of year. Both Jud and I played around climbing on very solid parts of the glacier a bit.. fun times! The glacier was pretty dirty on top but was crystal clear underneath all that soot.We found a pretty spot on the Castner and Jud proposed to Aviva!! (and he made me take pictures...) She had no idea he was going to do this, since he's been playing off that he didn't want to get married for a long time. It was pretty funny because her first words after a long pause were, "...are you serious????............really???" We'll just says Vives was in a very good mood for the rest of the trip. We didn't get back to the car until 11:30pm (still light out for the most part, even in cloud cover and moderate snow) and didn't eat dinner til 12:30am. Decided to camp out at the end of the little drive in they had off of the Richardson. The snow was accumulating on the tent as we were trying to put it up, but we woke up to the sun shining bright with the mountains towering around us.