Those dot-sized people give you a sense of scale. The glacier looked deceptively close from the trail head but we actually hiked 45 minutes across the scoured gorge before we even hit the ice.
the gear...
Remember that bit about the west coast being a rainforest? Yeah well, we woke up to rain, we drove in the rain to the glacier guided tour office, we drove in the bus to the park entrance in the rain, and yes, we trekked to the glacier in the rain, up it, on it, and down it in the rain.
I was figuring that maybe they weren't accustomed to leading groups in steady precip but duh, rainforest. I think the moldery smell coming off the jacket should have been a hint.Confession. I thought being drenched was going to crank me out but I absolutely dug it. 'Cause really, once you get full on soaked and you've got enough layers to keep warm and you're on a glacial StairMaster for 40 minutes, you feel just fine. By the end of the hike, the guide had us crawling through an ice cave, paws and knees in pools of recently melted glacier feeling pretty happy about it. Wet wool really does work. That and five tops, three hats, two pairs of socks, and one pair of mittens.
soggy K and J in an ice cave
I think J and I were the sickeningly lovin' it couple in the group. We found our inner goat. All smiles. The hike had us so juiced that the guide let us off our leashes and sent us ahead of the group back to the trail head where we sat for 10 minutes before everyone else turned up relishing the experience and the remainder of our PB&Js from lunch.
Camera in rain bad but we do have a limited offering of foggy lens shots to give the gist.
Camera in rain bad but we do have a limited offering of foggy lens shots to give the gist.
2 comments:
I feel I should note that K was a real superstar on this hike. In spite of the fact that she's suffering from a nasty head cold, she did the 4 hour hike in the freezing rain with no complaints, and left everyone else in the dust (mud?) at the end of the hike.
I should also note that the outfit we signed up for the hike with was impressively well run. They make it possible for jamokes such as ourselves to get up the terminal face of the glacier by hacking stairs into the ice. Since the terminal face is where the glacier ends because it's melting away, they have to continually reshape the steps with ice picks as they're traversing them. They also outfitted us with (sort of) waterproof jackets, pants boots, hats and ice talons. We'll post pictures of all of this if we can ever get blogger to cooperate.
I have been staring at the picture of a line of people walking up a channel. Is the channel cut by the passage of people year after year? Is it cut by water running off? I can't tell, but it must have been fun to walk along. From what Julian said in an e-mail, "Apparently, in the late 1800s, Franz Joseph Glacier stretched another 2 km down the valley, and although nobody brought it up, the subject of global warming was hanging in the air. But then our guide went on to tell us that in the '80s it was way further up the valley, and you had to walk an extra hour to get to it." So that suggests the thing is moving up and down at several kilometers per year. Can that be right?
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