“Thanda legey jaabey re!!!”, they will yell…

Every year, a new layer of snow up in the mountains creates more pressure on the layers below till it starts solidifying as ice and then crystallize. 10 feet of snow gets compacted into 1 foot of ice. But it takes 20 years for that process to happen.

The face of this glacier is about 200 feet. Quite some of it is under water. This is a particularly slow moving glacier. At barely a couple of feet a day and at about seven to eight miles long … you do the math and you realize something…

Those dark blue patches at the bottom? Yeah, they were part of the glacier before I was even born!! In my defense, I have had a much more active life 🙂

The sheer scale of these things is staggering…

It is like somebody took a knife to the glacier and said – Henceforth, thou shall be water….

Once advantage of an helicopter over a ski plane is that I could ask the pilot to just hang tight in one spot as I took shots. This is an amazing view of the glacier from a thousand feet up right where its face is (where it melts into the lake).

While most of the glacier is very smooth upstream, right near the face, there is a a long stretch where there are these long deep fissures. The fissures go real real deep. I have to research why this is so. My guess is the shearing force from the top of the ice layer as it tips off into the lake is creating this?

But the other thing to note is the amount of rocks and gravel the glacier has scooped up and is carrying with it. Note all the dark brown colors among the deep white and blue formations!

I was aware of these kind of small airports but had never been to one. As we took off from Girdwood airport, we circled once over this small bright color (almost looking like a DHL brand) airplane getting ready to take off. Notice something about the runway? It does not have asphalt on the top. It is a dirt road runway. I had heard of these runways but saw it for the first time. (Also, it is a very short runway – only 2,100 feet).

Initially, they looked like small white specks on the mountain side. Till our pilot pointed out that they were mountain goats, I assumed they were rocks! How these completely docile looking animals scale the near vertical faces of the rocky mountains, I will never know!

All this week in Alaska, Sharmila lamented that she did not get to see a moose! Not any more! We spotted a bull moose way below in the valley. In the big picture, it is off center to the right. The inset has a magnified picture that I was able to capture with the zoom lens as the helicopter circled the moose…

Flew along the twenty mile valley. It is difficult to capture the perspective of height and expanse with my camera – but here we were skimming about three thousand feet above the river water level (lowest point in the valley).