Ice Ice Baby!

Given my great love of all freezing cold-related activities - I’m never happier when I’m chilled to the bone, icicles hanging from my eyelashes, fingers burning with slow onset of frostbite on top of a Norwegian mountain - is it any wonder I leapt at the chance to go ice-walking on the Athabasca Glacier in Canada? I think my capacity to remember pain is limited...must be the memory loss induced by numerous head injuries incurred during activities that seemed like a good idea at the time, like skiing and paragliding. Luckily, the glacier walking was an accident-free experience, and really quite pleasant on the whole, albeit a tad nippy and windy.

Athabasca Glacier, Columbia Icefield

Putting our lives into the hands (or rather footprints) of our knowledgeable glacier guide, we crossed rocky terrain - once covered by ice, but now exposed as the glacier is receding by approximately 20 m per year - to reach the edge of the glacier.

Snow at the leading edge of the glacier

We first walked over the rather muddy looking snow left behind from the past winter, before stepping onto the ice at the toe of the glacier. Although the guide assured us that the ice is at least 200 m thick at it's shallowest point, I had to first get over my irrational fear that it would give way under my weight at any moment! The surface of the ice is melting to slush, with pools of water and blue ice beneath.
 
 

Our guide led us slowly up the glacier, pointing out millwells, which are the glacier's natural plumbing (funneling glacier melt water beneath the ice), and crevasses, like this one....

 

 

 

 

He then terrified enthralled us with a detailed account of "Death By Falling Into A Glacier Crevass", which goes along the chilling lines of this..... first, you fall until your body wedges in the crevass, then your body heat starts to melt the ice around you and you fall even further...this carries on until hypothermia sets in, and finally your body starts to freeze to the walls of the crevass....nice!

 

 

 

On the glacier

 

The surface of the glacier was quite slippy and a bit scary to walk over in the steeper parts (at least for a pathetic explorer like me!). All the time we were walking up the glacier, I was worrying about coming back down again, and having visions of toppling over, shooting down the icefield at great speed on my backside and only stopping when I encountered a rock, or worse, fell into a crevass. I consoled myself that my sizeable rear would probably save me, as I would become wedged close enough to the surface that rescue would be possible, provided they reached me in good time!

 

 

 

 

By now, the weather was turning a bit nasty (it wasn't exactly tropical to begin with) and standing on a glacier in the wind and rain with hidden dangers all around, I started questioning my sanity...and why I hadn't opted for the bus ride instead....

 

Terra bus...the transport of choice for the sensible glacier explorer

 
To my enormous relief, the guide's boss later caught us up bearing a rucksack of crampons....and thus kitted out, I had the confidence to begin the downwards walk. B didn't fare so well...we were one pair of crampons short for the group, so he went without, but was competely unperturbed as always (Macho, macho man! I've got to be a macho man!)