((Excerpted from Livejournal entry, 06/13/2005))

...we packed up, said g'bye to Elspeth and company, and drove out to the Matanuska Glacier. Driving out there was an adventure in itself. I'm pretty certain we put the rental car through situations explicitly banned in our rental agreement, but no harm done, honest. To get through the gate, we each had to sign a waiver,essentially stating:

"I, the undersigned, acknowledge that only a complete 'tard would think walking on top of a slowly melting glacier was anything remotely related to safe. I, the undersigned, admit I am a stupid git, and if I get killed or maimed it is my own damn fault..." etc., etc., etc.

The Matanuska fed the enormous river that we'd followed to get up here - I think it was the Eagle, but I'd have to find it on a map to be certain.

Up to now, I thought I had seen rivers before. Not so. this river looped across and FILLED the floodplain that was the (admittedly narrow) valley floor. Other streams and small rivers and snowmelt also fed it as it flowed towards Anchorage, but the source flowed out from under the glittering spires and scales of the Matanuska ice-dragon, a sprawling, creeping continent of unearthly blue that filled the end of the valley and disappeared out of site around the curve of it. The river was brown and white-capped at its source, and retained its waves and swiftness even when stretched wall to wall along the valley. Logs and trees and islands and dams studded the length of it, with the occasional oxbow lake, smooth as glass, for comparison. The mountains to either side were warmed, brown and green with the occasional runnel of white remaining. The mountains behind THEM were white.

So we went out to the Glacier trailhead and walked through the lifeless low hillocks and berms of black moraine in front of the glacier - which, alternating between ash-grey(dry) silt and coal-black(wet) dirt, bore a disturbing resemblance to a volcanic lava flow, only softer, muddier and wetter. As we slogged along the "trail", a vaguely defined pathway marked by infrequent orange traffic cones and the occasional plank (at a guess, they had to rearrange it daily because of the torrential snowmelt rolling out from under the glacier) it gradually dawned on us that the water bubbling up at random under our feet was ALSO snowmelt - there was ice underneath the moraine we were walking on, and we'd probably been ON the glacier for a good five minutes or so, covered with an encrustation of earth and stones.

We began to feel the soft crunch of ice beneath our feet as the moraine thinned. We were still several hundreds of yards away from the blue fairy-scape we had seen from the road when we began to see patches of smooth glass in the dirt underfoot. The first chunks of ice we saw were black - not the little crunchy bits of old snow but huge, domed obsidian windows that yawned cavernously under us. The layer of earthy moraine hid the ice from the light, so we looked down into the glacier and saw an abyssal blackness that chilled us to the bone. We walked carefully around them, even though intellectually we knew they would not shatter beneath us - they weren't windows at all, but the polished surfaces of massive ice boulders, solid through and through. We walked past yawning caverns of blackness, the only sound the soft patter of melting water and our own nervous chatter. we crested one ridge, another, and walked out onto the coarse white-blue glacial icefield.

We walked out to the sign that informed us that we couldn't go any further without a guide, and fooled around a bit until the other people had gone on past (with a guide, of course). We noticed here that the ice, speckled with a thin layer of black grit, was a deep blue in sun, but in our shadows became amost a brilliant blue-white, lighter in contrast with the reflected glow from deep within. It's this reflected light that gives a mass of ice its uncanny hue. We decided to (carefully) ignore the sign's warning and venture a little farther into the icefield.

(Stop making that face, Mom. I know you are.)

We didn't go far - just up to the top of a nearby bulge. from there we could see the length of the ice-dragon, and where it pushed and ground against the earth, tilling it under blunt blue claws with motions measured only in seasons. Meg snapped pictures of it until her camera was out of memory, and eventually we walked back down to the sign, mingling with other hikers and geologists and cracking nervous jokes over the bubbling mud blooms and black earth dust.