On the way out there there were all these bushes called 'fire flowers' that provide a great contrast against the white and blue if the glacier.
One thing that I haven't mentioned yet is the ridiculous wind that howls through this whole valley. At its highest (right around now) it can reach up to 100km/h! It wasn't that fast today but I was a little windswept.
They have a really good network of platforms all around the peninsula that is at the edge of the glacier so you can get to within 200m of the face. No nearer though as since this is a moving glacier bits keep falling off. Apparently it moves at 2m per day but so much falls off the front it basically stays in the same place as far as we can tell. Sadly no pictures of parts falling off, I did see it happen but wasn't fast enough with my camera, but if you look at these two pictures you might notice one 'cave' is a little bigger in one than the other.......
It's not obvious, and the pictures aren't taken from exactly the same place but I'm pretty confidant that between the first and the second that some of the ice ended up in the lake.
After hiking around the front of the glacier for about an hour or so it was time to board a boat and head off to the face on the water........
I've got a bunch of photos of this thing but it's all ultimately a lot of pictures of an ice wall. If you want me to post more let me know and I'll put them in a separate post.
The front of the glacier itself is 30m tall from the surface of the water with a further 110m below the surface. As I said, it continues to push forward coming down out of the mountains but due to the stress on the front huge chunks keep falling off and keep the face where it is. As a result, as you travel around there you keep hearing creaks and cracks as pieces work their way loose, they don't always fall but sometimes they do and come down with an almighty crash.
That's all for today, early start tomorrow, I'm going to go walking on the glacier :o). It's about a 6 hour hike with crampons and everything into the center of the glacier. Hopefully that's the center in two dimensional surface definition, not three dimensional right in the middle definition, but some of those crevasses look pretty big........
I'll send you pictures tomorrow, hopefully............ :o)
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