We spent the first night along the river and then hiked just a bit further down the river the next day before heading up the side of the mountain. The riverbed is easy to walk on, aside from the stream crossings, but we couldn't follow the river to the glacier because the crevassed cliffs would prevent us from getting onto the glacier. The area below treeline consists of ten foot tall alder thickets which are very difficult to negotiate. There are no trails in the park, so it's all about finding the shortest route through the thickets to the meadows above treeline, where walking is fairly easy. We'd been told that we could follow a moraine up to treeline, but that wasn't possible. From below, you can't get an overview, so you don't know how long the thickets go on.
We got lucky and picked a tongue with rocky pockets in the alder thickets, so we had a reasonable path to the base of the mountain. Then we were not as lucky, and spent a while bushwhacking up. It wasn't fun, but I must say that Search and Rescue has definitely given me a lot more patience for that sort of thing. Instead of just cursing the thickets, I could step back and appreciate that there were no thorns or briars. And I knew that I could keep it up for hours if I had to. All in all, I found it far preferable to fighting my way through a rhododendron or briar thicket in North Carolina.
While we were hiking up the mountain, we could hear the sand cliffs along the river "calving" off big hunks of sand. It wasn't quite as impressive as seeing a glacier calve, but it was still amazing to see how much sand and dust gets kicked up, and to hear it from a mile or two away. You can see the cliffs on the far side of the river, where the river has cut away at the bank.
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