BERG TO BEACHES
BACKPACKING
Multi Day
- Backpacking
- Expert
From icy 'bergs to sandy beaches...and everything in between!
The Chugach Mountains have some of the best and most scenic backpacking in Alaska. We’ve found a special route through these mountains that will leave you breathless – both from the incredible views and the challenging terrain!
The route begins in the wide valleys of wildflowers and low-growing tundra where grizzly bears roam their huge territories. Building in difficulty, the route takes you to the tumultuous moraine at the edge of the massive Bremner Glacier where hills of rocks and mud challenge your balance and endurance.
Making it out onto the glacier itself, you’ll get to see the unique and other-worldly features of ice. From rivers, moulins, and brilliant blue pools to bottomless crevasses, you’ll put the crampons to good use exploring this special landscape.
The route ends at the sandy beaches of the terminus of the glacier, surrounded by lush and thick greenery. A hard-earned and well-deserved beach day concludes this one-of-a-kind backpacking trip.
- Variety of engaging and scenic terrain
- Route covers glaciers and includes a glacial camp
- Rugged and challenging trek for experienced backpackers
- Stunning views of glaciated mountains
- Not likely to see anyone else on this route
Trip Details
Trip Length
7 days
Total Mileage
30mi
Total Elevation Gain/Loss
4,400’
Rates
Private Solo
$6,775
Private 2 Participant
$4,050/person
Private 3-6 Participants
$3,330/person
Group
$3,210/person
Group Trip Dates
June 27 – July 3, 2025
August 14 – 20, 2025
Private Trips with custom dates are available. Book now or call our Expedition Coordinator to plan your trip today!
The “Alaska Factor”
There is a reason Alaska has such a rugged allure for the lower 48 and beyond: it is still wild! This raw and untamed landscape offers our clients the opportunity to authentically pioneer new territory and have real adventures. Part of embracing the “Alaska Factor” is understanding that things may not always go as planned and expecting the unexpected. Water levels might rise, snow might fall, glaciers may shift and move – the landscape is dynamic and unpredictable is what makes Alaska, Alaska!
All of our trips are customized as they unfold and your guide will fluidly make decisions based on weather, logistics, and group dynamics to maximize each day’s experience. There can be quite a bit of variation, but on each trip we promise a big slice of the real Alaska and authentic adventure!
DAY 0
DAY 1
Driving to the airstrip, you get your camera out for the beautiful ~40min bush flight across the Chitina Valley and into the Chugach Mountains! Landing on the old lake bed of Iceberg Lake (from where the trip gets part of its name) you’ll take a minute to take in your surroundings – rocks underfoot, soft tundra nearby, wildflowers bursting with color near the river, massive peaks in every direction and hanging glaciers as far as the eye can see! This must be what they call the “real Alaska”!
Making your way down the valley, and across your first major stream, you’ll marvel at the stark contrast between the lunar landscape or rock and ice and the colorful flowers and greenery near the river’s edge. Tonight you’ll find a comfortable camp at the base of a small glacier and your guide will impress you with their backcountry cooking skills – how were they able to pull off such gourmet dinner on a camp stove?!
DAY 2
Getting out of your tent this morning you’re pinching yourself. Yesterday was real! We’re really out here! The smell of coffee and bacon let you know that breakfast is ready and the day is about to begin. There’s so much to explore here, the group opts for a short day hike to visit a couple of crystal clear blue lakes high in the alpine – perhaps a morning dip to really get the blood flowing! After packing up camp, you make your way onto the glacier and get your first taste of the ice. This glacier is easy to move across and you make great time while being able to explore its scenic features. Another stream crossing gets you onto the tundra and you eventually set up camp in the lush and green carpet of tiny plants and lichens.
DAY 3
Waking up rested and refreshed, you’re up early for some morning yoga with your guide. Breathe in the fresh alpine air as you stretch your legs and back, feeling stronger from carrying your heavy pack. Breakfast is followed by camp take down and soon you’re on the move again. Wildflowers dot the green tundra as far as the eye can see and ground squirrels squeak merrily as you pass by. Covering a lot of ground on this easy terrain, you make your way around the corner to the hilly and rocky moraine of an unnamed glacier. One final push up and over the rocks brings you to one of our favorite campsites in the Park!
DAY 4
What was that?! The crash of a calving glacier wakes you up this morning and you quickly look out of your tent to see if you can catch the action! All through breakfast your conversations are interrupted by the rumbles of the surrounding ice as you make a gameplan for the day.
Feeling rested and refreshed you wake up knowing that today will be a big one. There are a couple of different ways to go from here and none of them are easy – today might be the most challenging day of the trip! Covering very little ground as the crow flies, make sure to track your steps and you’ll be shocked and how many actual miles you walked and the elevation gained and lost on your “shortest day”.
Hiking over seemingly endless hills of loose rock, you’ll make your way through some challenging morrain (or maybe over a mountain pass!) and come out triumphant on or near the mighty Bremner Glacier. Tired but accomplished, you inhale your dinner and plop into your tent, sleep coming easily tonight.
DAY 5
A completely different landscape greats you this morning and you wonder if you somehow made it to the moon in your epic travels yesterday. The vegetation is far up on the mountainsides and you are surrounded, as far as the eye can see, by rock and ice. Strap on your crampons and get ready to explore!
The glacier is full of incredible and unique sights and features that will continue to amaze you as you weave your way around crevasses. The navigation may be tricky at first, but soon enough you’ll find a “highway” of flat ice and be able to cruise. Finding a comfortable medial moraine, you’ll set up your tents in the middle of the glacier for full 360 views of this incredibly serene place!
DAY 6
Waking up on the glacier you are struck by the quiet…but excited calls from the cook tent break your reverie and you run over knowing a delicious surprise awaits! The goal of the day is to get off the glacier and back on land while avoiding the extra heinous-looking moraine at its terminus. Luckily your guide knows a sneak route that only involves a little bit of bushwhacking! Seasoned over the last few days, you embrace the challenge with a smile.
Tonight’s dinner is supplemented with everyone’s highlights (and lowlights) of the route, inside jokes, and continuous laughter – these feels are going to stick with you for a long time.
DAY 7
You decide to wake up early today to soak in all the backcountry time you can. So these are the beaches the trip is named after! We made it! Digging your toes into the super-fine glacial silt, you stroll along the river’s edge barefoot, identifying animal prints as you go. Once everyone is up on this lazy morning and breakfast has been thoroughly enjoyed, the group sets out on a short day hike to take in the surrounding sandy landscape and the maze of glacial streams and rivers, merging with different colors and concentrations of silt. In the afternoon, you pack up your gear and head to the airstrip, listening for the buzz of a bush plane coming into the valley. Flying back to McCarthy you realize that just in the next valley is a whole other world, and in the next one and the next one…you’re already starting to plan your return trip!
- Customized trip planning
- Logistics consultation*
- Your professional guide(s) – 4:1 ratio
- Orientation and a Gear Shakedown
- Stunning 45min bush flights in and out of the backcountry
- All the food on the trip
- Group gear (bear canisters, cookware, fuel, tents**)
- Crampons
*Upgrade to a Trip Package and have logistics included with your trip!
**We recommend that you bring your own tent if possible
What’s not included?
- Gratuities
- Personal camping and hiking gear
- Logistics
You’ll need to be in McCarthy the day before your trip begins for an Orientation and Gear Shakedown. You’ll meet your guide, grab group gear and make sure you are fully prepared to go into the backcountry.
Please account for a full day for travel both to and from McCarthy and the next Alaskan destination. We don’t recommend leaving McCarthy the last day of your trip as this cuts significantly into your last backcountry day and usually makes for a very hectic drive.
Check out our Transportation Page to learn how to get to and from McCarthy. Check out our Lodging Page for lodging recommendations in the area.
Trip Package
If you are planning your trip +2 months before your trip start date, upgrade to a Trip Package! A Trip Package will include transportation to/from McCarthy, local lodging, and any other local activities you’re interested in. We charge a non-refundable $50 Trip Package fee per person for this service.
This is an Expert Backpacking Trip 
We often hear that our trips are the hardest trips our clients have ever done, and we hear this even from very experienced backpackers. Why? Because Alaska’s undeveloped wilderness is rough and rugged and provides endless natural challenges which make for slow going but also an extremely engaging and fulfilling experience! Our expert backpacking trips require a high level of fitness and conditioning and training prior to these trips is mandatory. On these trips, you can expect to cover up to 10 miles a day of steep, rugged, unstable, and inconsistent terrain with a 45-55lb pack of all your personal gear plus some group gear. You can expect to gain/lose between 1,000-3,000’ a day. You will be camping in the rugged wilderness with no manmade shelters, toilets, or really any type of development. These trips are perfect for very fit and experienced backpackers and we recommend starting training 2-3 months prior to the start of the trip.
GALLERY
GET IN TOUCH
WITH AN EXPEDITION
COORDINATOR!
FAQ
Wrangell – St. Elias National Park is home to both black bears and grizzly bears and we are honored to share our home with such majestic animals. We treat the bears with respect and do our best to maintain their wild environment and nature. The bears out here are truly very wild and have very little contact with humans – this means that they are naturally afraid of us! Yes, even grizzlies! Bears do not hunt humans and our most common bear sighting is of a bear’s butt as they run away.
Although bear sightings may be exciting, we do our best to avoid close encounters with preventative measures at camp and while hiking that our guides will share with you. Just in case of unusually close encounters, our guides carry flare guns (to scare a bear away) and pepper spray (in case of an uncomfortably close meeting). It is very uncommon to have to use either.
If you want to, you can bring your own bear spray too, however, know that your guide has one and has been trained on how to use it. With 40 years of guiding in the Park, we have found that being bear aware, taking preventative measures and the flare gun and pepper spray to be sufficient mitigations.
Please refrain from bringing firearms with you on our trips. Not only does this make our other guests and guides uncomfortable, but they are also completely unnecessary for bear safety. We know that other areas of Alaska may recommend firearms for bear safety, but we specifically recommend against them.
We pride ourselves on cooking healthy and delicious meals even under the most adverse conditions! Your exact menu will depend on the trip, your guide, and the dietary preferences/restrictions you list in your Trip Application. No matter what kind of cook your guide is at home, all our guides are well-trained backcountry chefs and use time-tested recipes from our proprietary cookbook for their trips. We carry a plentiful and varied stock of ingredients and most meals are prepared from scratch (allowing for easy substitutions, additions or subtractions of ingredients). We onlyt use pre-packed freeze-dried meals on summit pushes on our mountaineering expeditions.
On our backpacking and basecamp trips, you can expect 3 meals a day, plus snacks of your choice. Breakfasts and dinners are usually hot meals and lunches are served cold. On mountaineering trips lunches consist of a variety of snacks as it can be hard to organize group meals while on a rope team.
We use a combination of fresh, dehydrated, and freeze-dried ingredients to make our delicious meals, however on longer backpacking and mountaineering trips your guides will use more freeze-dried foods than fresh foods to keep pack weights as low as possible. On our rafting trips, we cook full multi-course meals with fresh ingredients and enjoy hot and cold breakfasts, cold lunches and hot dinners.
Meals for most trips start with Lunch on the first day and end with Lunch on the last day. *
*If you are signed up for a Custom Trip Package with us, it may include more meals. Check with us if you’re not sure. Mountaineering trips also include meals in McCarthy before and after the backcountry expedition.
We understand that you may have luggage or things you don’t want to bring into the backcountry with you so we have a designated area at our headquarters where your guide will label and store your stuff while you’re out. This area is not locked, however, we have never had any issues with loss or damage. If you have a small item of great value that you are particularly nervous about, we may be able to store it in our office for you – just ask your guide.
On the Chitina River, Copper River, Source to Sea, or Custom Trips with different start and end points, any luggage you leave behind with us will be brought out to meet you at the end of the trip.
