A Legendary Flight to the Ray Mountains

This past weekend I flew to the Ray Mountains South of Bettles to explore around Sithylemenkat Lake, an unusual lake that is 1500 feet deep and nearly perfectly round, giving rise to speculation that it may have been formed by a meteor strike.
The lake lies in the rain shadow of the Ray Mountains so it never gets much snow but this time the snow had blown clear, leaving beautiful glare ice which made the airplane into a frictionless object with very little tendency to slow down after landing. Just the idling engine was enough to keep the plane sliding along and it finally took pulling the mixture and stopping the prop to get the plane to come to rest on the slippery ice.
The ice itself showed amazing variation with many trapped bubbles and tiny inclusions frozen into the ice giving the impression of numerous jelly fish suspended in the ice. In other areas the ice was fractured into lacy patterns.
An old friend, now deceased had built a cabin on the lake in the early 1970's. The cabin was sheathed on the outside with old aluminum news print plates which, on the shady side of the cabin still tell the stories from the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. Alas, a bear has recently destroyed the interior of the cabin and scattered its contents including a sad pair of boots.
Towering over the lake are a series of granite tors standing tooth like in rows. On the way back from the lake, the route of flight included the Yukon River and the bridge across the Yukon where the Trans-Alaska Pipeline crosses.