Matanuska Glacier
2 pm
After the two introductory moulins and blue pools, we began to make our way though ice corridors towards the largest blue pond of the day.
Earlier in the summer this valley had been a lake. Using the photograph above will give you a point of reference, we were standing at the bottom of an old lake, the bottom of a bathtub. The white walls of ice surrounding this valley, the white porcelain walls of a tub, had held water just a few weeks ago. Now, we walked along the rock bottom, the lake’s bed to visit the final remanence of the lake.
This remaining blue pool, like the two previous, was actually a moulin, the bathtub drain, funneling water to another part of the glacier. In the last few days, a tunnel had opened up next to the pool, a different style of drain but serving the same function, moving glacier water.
h
This blue pool was spectacular and were it not in the middle of nowhere, were it not a drain with the potential to suck anything into the vast depths of this glacier, a sneaky swim would have been epic. The water was comprised of many different blues due to varying depths but also effected by the textures of its icy walls.
The tunnel was just as blue as the pool, its color also depending with depth, and like the pool it was also vast. Our guide told us some friends went exploring, canyoneering, down this tunnel a few days before. How scary to walk into the abyss of a glacier, a living moving creature that could swallow you whole.
The day was drawing to and end and it was time for us to climb back onto the top of the glacier. Our guide rigged ropes and acted as our anchor once again to help us climb up a short icy shelf. Once up the shelf, we moved through a valley, photographed below, and the gain in height offered an incredible view of rolling white hills of glacier ice, of the light turquoise river snaking through the old lake bed, of moody grey clouds that sheltered us from the sun.
