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.