It seemed like we had spent the entire day crossing a glacier, but the moraine on the other side was other worldly, I felt like a hobbit finally venturing out beyond the shire. This landscape was so new and strange and I felt so small in relation.
The moraine we started the day out on was not surprising or remarkable or difficult, and not just because it was the beginning of the day when we were fresh and ready to go. And the moraine on the other side was not remarkable simply because we were tired. Really tired. At least I was. So fucking tired.
This was the first time I had ever put crampons on my feet. I had never walked on a glacier before. I had walked up to glaciers. I had walked across something some people refer to as a glacier, but is really a snow field that doesn't melt. I was freaking out on this ice. I freaked out like I haven't freaked out on terrain since I was a kid. Mostly it was the downhill. I did not like the downhill, and mostly that's what it used to be on solid dirt ground scree.
We had to get down from the moraine to camp on the fosse. And, from the way we had come, it didn't seem like that would be such an arduous task. However, I wasn't aware that the moraine on that side ends abruptly, in ice cliffs. The moraine wasn't even what I thought it would be. I think of moraine as a pile of rock. And when glaciers recede, the moraine that is left, is a pile of rocks. Potentially well indurated, but a pile of rocks none the less. An active glacier* has moraine made of ice with a thin veneer of rock on top. If you happen to push aside that thin layer, you are on the ice.
Ice is slippery. All the time. It doesn't have to be wet. Don't bring up dry ice, i'm talking about H two O at ambient pressure and temperature. Icy ice.
But, we did get down, found a place to put our tents, had some dinner and relaxed. And didn't get to bed until the sun went down. And that was late, the sun goes down late, even in August, even that far south.
*or just this one? my stellar performance in geomorphology (taught by a glaciologist no less) circa 199....6(?) did not prepare me for those cliffs, they were sharp and curved, like conchoidal fracture, not an engineered looking squared-off 90 degree corner like the next day's jokulhlaup.
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