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.