The plaque at this location reads:
"Ruth Glacier The Great Gorge
The Greatest Gorge.
The Greatest Gorge of Ruth Glacier may be the deepest gorge in the world; its towering granite walls provide spectacular scenery, fascinating geology, and high-angle fun for the adventurous.
Pop-up Mountains
About 55 million years ago, large blobs of magma rose towards the surface and cooled, forming huge masses of granite called plutons. About 6 million years ago, the pressure of colliding tectonic plates far to the sough squeezed these plutons upward to form the Alaska Range, much like a wet bar of soap being squeezed from your hand. These mountains continue to rise today, but at a rate about as slow as your nails grow.
Adventurous Destination
Today the Great Gorge and Ruth Glacier attract skiers and mountaineers from afar who relish the high granite walls and scenery. As the mountains rise, the Ruth Glacier continues to cut the valley deaper. Imagine how deep this gorge may be in another million years!
Deaper than the Grand Canyon
Erosional forces of wind, water and ice are working relentlessly to flatten these rising plutons, which are Alaska Range's backbone. Ruth Glacier's continuing assault has cut a 9,000 foot deep gorge into one of the exposed plutons. Although true depth cannot be observed since Ruth Glacier still fills nearly half of it. "
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In addition, this State Parks website provides additional information: (
visit link)
" Denali National Park and Preserve
Ruth Glacier
Ruth Gorge descending on the south side of Mount McKinley.
One of the most spectacular features in the park, next to the massiveness of Mount McKinley, is the dramatic "Great Gorge" of the Ruth Glacier. The upper Ruth Glacier, which is almost 3 vertical miles below the summit of Mount McKinley, catches all of the snow that falls on the southeast side of the mountain. The snow and ice that accumulate in this area are squeezed through the one-mile-wide bottleneck of the Great Gorge. Through this gorge, the glacier drops nearly 2,000 feet over ten miles and is raked with crevasses. Buttressed on either side by solid granite cliffs that tower 5,000 feet above the glacier’s surface, this gorge is not only a spectacular sight, but offers world-class challenges for mountaineers. In 1983, researchers from the University of Alaska found the depth of the ice within the gorge to be more than 3,800 feet. Combined, the depth of the glacier and the height of the towering cliffs create an abyss that is deeper than the Grand Canyon. If the glacier melted and you dropped a coin from the top of Mt. Dickey, it would fall for more than one and a half miles before coming to a rest in the bottom of this gorge. The glacier, which now stops the coin after traveling only a mile, moves at an impressive speed of 3.3 feet per day, At this rate, 4 million pounds of ice may flow into and out of the gorge daily! Will Harrison, a glaciologist who has worked in the gorge, relates his experience: "Usually at the margin of a glacier you can find a place to set a surveyor’s prism. On west side of the gorge you could not. The walls there were smooth and not just vertical, but overhanging! …It’s amazing to think of how overhanging cliffs that tall could be created."