Ice Caves- Round 2!

So a friend of mine brought back some excellent pictures from the ice caves the day before yesterday. I became instantly jealous and decided to go again, since last time there weren't any actual caves to go into.

After I finished my whale watching tour, I hurried back home where Gina, my roommate, was waiting for me. We hopped into her car, stuck Coco in the back seat and went on our way to the caves! It's a good thing that Gina and I are in pretty good shape because we had to hurry; we left a little after 5PM. Luckily we don't have to worry about the sun going down too early since it doesn't get dark until after 10PM or so. I brought my dad's flashlight and some extra batteries anyway, just in case (thanks dad!).

It didn't take us long at all to get to the hazardous unmaintained trail sign. I was worried that once we got to the difficult trail, Coco would start getting in the way. How in the world could a dog scramble up the huge rocky cliffs that we had to climb? I had forgotten this was the famous bear-fighting, porcupine-eating Coco we're talking about. She can do anything. And she certainly made it there just fine!

Coco posing in front of the glacier. She even hopped up onto it and ran around a few times.. more than I could do! She's a glacier-climbing dog now!

Coco explores the ice caves. Dogs are colorblind though, right? Wonder if she noticed that the ice was blue..

Beautiful blue light streams down and through the glacier into this cave.

I found a large tunnel underneath the glacier, so I just had to crawl through it!

 

I slipped into the rain gear that I always have in my pack for this tunnel. Boy was it wet in there!

Here is a series of photos I took of the walls in the tunnel.

Now you can see why I'm so obsessed with getting good pictures of the ice! Aren't these colors and textures just beautiful? I haven't altered these pictures in any way.. it's really this blue!

 

Gina and I both got pretty muddy. Yep, I'm the shoes on the right. (Don't worry, mom, I cleaned them up! Love the boots by the way!) Crawling through the tunnels was a muddy experience. Just trying to stand up was difficult. I could feel my body sinking deeper into the mud with each passing moment. And this isn't your ordinary mud- this is glacial mud! Because the glacier is a river of moving ice, it carves through the mountainsides and scrapes up the rocks as it passes. Within the ice, the silt is carried and deposited at the face of the glacier into the lake. There are mounds and mounds of glacial silt, and it's so fine that once within the lake, it never really settles. The lake always has a milky appearance because of this. And all the fine sand that surrounds the lake gives it a beach-like appearance. But if you've got lots of that incredibly fine, fresh silt that's still right underneath the glacier, mixing with streams of runoff beneath it, you make for pits that are almost like quicksand. I sure had trouble getting out of there!

And just so you can see how much the glacier's been changing, here's another shot of its face. Keep in mind that it moves forward about a foot a day, but melts about a foot and a half a day. That's why it never looks the same, and the caves can be different weekly!

These large chunks that have begun floating out toward the center of the lake were probably the face of the glacier in the last photos I posted. The face has been calving a lot recently!

 

Coco waits for Gina and me at the top of a rocky cliff on the way back. She had no trouble at all scrambling up the sides of the bare rock. Well... she did need a boost, but just once. :)

Enjoy the photos! I'll make sure to post more soon.