Besides for its jagged peaks and spires and startling crevasses, the most amazing thing about the ice is its color. Wherever it folds in on itself, the ice is blue–often the stunning aquamarine of the clearest tropical waters, but also in places a rich deep blue that wants to hold onto your eyeballs and never let go. Here are some pictures of glacial ice, as true to shape and color as I could get them.
The next post will talk about icebergs. Which, it turns out, are also beautiful.
Let me just say, for the record, that I don’t like ice. I don’t like walking on ice. I especially don’t like walking uphill and most especially downhill on ice. (See walkers below, tiny compared to the ice.)
So what am I doing here, crampons strapped to my rented hiking boots, preparing to set out on the ice of this glacier?
That’s me, second from the right, back to the camera, contemplating death via uncontrolled slide into the frigid waters of the lake below.
No, actually, what I’m doing is preparing to have some serious ice-stomping fun. Crampons are great. For an hour and a half, the group marches firmly (this is how you have to walk, wearing crampons) across a landscape of ice that seems to be part of another planet.
We edge around bottomless sinkholes, ford rivers flowing over ice, gape at overhangs of vivid cerulean.
The ice is beautiful, and ultimately, that’s why we’re all here. But more on the sheer beauty of it in the next post.
The thing that neither words nor images convey adequately is the sheer size of the Perito Moreno glacier. But of course I’m going to try.
First, the words. Perito Moreno’s front on Lake Argentina is three miles wide, with an average height of 240 feet. That’s about the height of a twenty-story office building. It’s also about twenty miles long, one arm of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest reserve of fresh water on the planet (after Antarctica and Greenland). And Perito Moreno is one of only a small handful (three?) of glaciers that are growing. It advances about six to ten feet a day.
Distances are large here under the Patagonian mountains and sky. So the glacier may not look like much from a distance.
But when you’re on a tour boat in front of the glacier, you feel small. Really small. The whole boat full of fifty (more or less) people feels small.
Well, actually, compared to the glacier, the boat *is* small. Here’s a photo from the shore, with the boat about halfway across the lake in front of the glacier. I circled the boat in red. I had to, because otherwise you might miss it.
This is A WHOLE LOT OF ICE.
Next post: Trekking on the ice, or fun with crampons.
“I’ve been cut by the beauty of jagged mountains…”
“…and cut by the love that flows like a fountain from God.”
Thanks for the lyrics, Bruce Cockburn. They surely apply to the ice mountains of the Perito Moreno glacier. More in later posts.
I’m going to skip over the sunsets from our last weekend on the island and go right away to the moonrise. The moon was full–so full that objects cast sharp shadows in the silver light. On the night we left, the moon was rising as we waited for the ferry. It was mostly veiled by clouds, but I caught this moment at Old Harbor.
Hard as it is to believe, I will be out of the country–and probably without my computer–this time next week. If I am able to make posts, I’ll write about my trip. So for now the sunsets are on hold. More in January!
Happy holidays, everyone!
The weekend of November 19-21 was a bittersweet one for us. It was our last weekend on the island. This is always a kind of sad affair, the last several hours of which involve laundering and putting away the sheets and towels, draping the sofas and chairs with old slip covers and drop cloths so that they will not fade, and packing all our clothing, food, and even many of the staples that we don’t want to leave over the winter in the cold, cold house.
But the island gave us many gifts this weekend, as it often does; and so over the next few weeks I will share with you our unexpected visitors, two sunsets, and a moonrise.
On Friday we were visited by two does and their fawns. If they had come any closer to the house, they would have been sitting on our deck chairs, and we would have had to offer them some gin-and-tonics with their grass. These pictures are taken through the (dirty) windows, so the quality is not the best. But the subjects were so photogenic it hardly mattered.
I think these are the two fawns. They arrived separately and seemed really happy to see one another. Friends.
Here’s a cuter shot.
And this picture, with the porch column in the foreground, may give you an idea of how close they came to the house.
Surf’s high! The view from the beach on a windy November day.
Here’s an unusual cloud formation.
Adverbs, particularly those ending in -ly, have gone out of fashion these days. Many advisors to writers are now advising that we not use them. Preferably not at all. Or, if we must, then as seldom as possible. Naturally (oops), this leads to the question: What should a writer should use instead?
Here are some answers.
If you are beginning to find this list arbitrary and even a bit nonsensical, please join the crowd. Many writers, published and not, rightly find the current campaign against adverbs unwarranted. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that all the great writers used adverbs. Even Shakespeare used adverbs.
This is a fashion we’re talking about, folks, and like all fashions, it will pass. Take the good parts and ignore the nonsensical ones. Lose the qualifiers. Strengthen nouns and especially verbs. Choose dynamic adjectives. Find metaphors that wake your readers up. Then, if you still have a place for them, use adverbs that sing. And use them effectively.
Thank you, Catherine Ryan Hyde, for this quote from author Elmore Leonard. When asked what a person should write if he wants to make money, Leonard replied, “Ransom notes.”
You can read Ms. Hyde’s full article (on the economics of being a novelist) in DailyFinance here.