Because We Can

The Franz Josef glacier lies within a valley and conveniently on top of a fault line, which makes it unique in several ways.  Even though the glacier continues to grind down the rock, the mountains themselves are growing, and therefore the system has reached a compromise.  Secondly the glacier is only 250 meters above sea level, which makes it accessible and also contributes to its high rate of movement.  It can move up to one meter a day.

So after being properly suited up, we approached the edge of what appeared to be a giant pile of dirty snow and began the long hike up.  Our guide Nicky had a pick axe and began to crack at the ice every few feet, either creating new ice steps or re-carving old ones, melting constantly under our feet.  We were wearing ice talons so our feet would grip nicely on the ice, but the way was still treacherous, and wet-- cold water was washing over our feet.  In no time at all we'd climbed impossibly high, standing on meters and meters of hard glacial ice.  At times it was white and flaky like snow, other times it was hard, smooth and blue, other times it was dirty with silt and stones stuck in it, sometimes it was all of these.  We could fill our water blottles with glacial melt from runoff dripping down through channels or out of nowhere through holes in the walls.  On either side of the glacier were the steep valley cliffs.

On our trip with us were two Israeli men.  Nice men, they could not for the life of them remember how to put on their ice talons.  We had to remove them for the siltier areas, and each time we would wait while they put them on wrong.  Perhaps the problem was language, but I think it was more likely that they'd never seen ice before in their lives.

We passed through narrow crevasses of blue ice towering high above our heads, squeezed through small openings and passed over endless guide-made stairs, over metal bridges laid across the deeper dangerous crevasses, over and up and down until we'd reached an area where the glacier had belched up its insides.  The coverage was silt and stones and huge rocks, and it was hard to tell that were on a glacier at all for the moment, though it went on endlesslessly in front of us.

Glaciation, though the process makes sense in a vague and mind boggling way, can't be expressed without seeing it in action-- here the river was entirely glacier created, some of the valley as well.  Huge boulders were trapped here and there in the ice and it was clear that eventually they would either be ground up into smaller pieces or carried miles away from where they began.  The silt on top was being rolled down and in and out, flowing with the glacier but also being periodically swallowed by the ice as it melts and refreezes over itself.    The definition of a glacier is deceptively simple.  That is any system which receives more snowfall then it can melt in a year.  This snow packs down with the weight of the snow on top of it, and thus becomes compressed and very very hard.  Here at Franz Josef the reaction to a year's snowfall takes about seven years, they receive about 40 meters of snow on average.  This is an extremely active glacier as glaciers go.  Currently it is advancing but over a century it has retreated.  Global warming?  Yes.  Due to humans?  They won't say.  The last big advance of this glacier was in 1890's, the Little Ice Age.

We passed over the silted area and continued on to the second ice fall.  Fewer guide made steps and no guide ropes awaited us here, at one point we crossed an area narrower than our feet, a cliff of ice ascending above us and a sheer drop below us.  Nicky did it though, and she did it confidently, so we took deep breaths and followed suit.  They don't call it adventure tourism for nothing.  We do it because we can.  At the height of the trip, the Israelis took out their flag and posed.  We'd conquered this mountain, and we'd be the only ones to do so.  Tomorrow, or the next day our path will change, perhaps become impassable, perhaps the whole pass would slide down into itself and reform the galcier.  It's moving underneath our feet; we're surfing a big tidal wave.

The trip down took less than an hour, and as all good trips go, the experience has already faded into dream.  Did we really climb a glacier?  We have the pictures to prove it.  Also glacial melt water and some rocks.  They're glacier rocks.  No, really.