Friday... After a leisurely morning of breakfast, cocoa and reading, we put some rocks in the tent to secure it from the wind and took a 5-6 mile dayhike to scout out where we were going, and how we might get there. As we got closer to the glacier, we could see clearly how the moraines were composed of different kinds of rock, and were strikingly different colors.
We hiked all the way down to the lateral moraine and then along the moraine to scout out how we would get out onto the glacier. From above, it doesn't look too bad, but we got very discouraged when we got down to the moraine and realized that it really wasn't going to be easy to get past it.
The moraine is like a mini-hill running along the length of the glacier, and from either side, you have to hike up and over it. From the land side, it's not too high or steep, but from the glacier side... Imagine a fifty foot tall pile of fist- to head- to person-sized rocks that's been bulldozed to the side so that the slope is the steepest angle the rocks can support; then put a small crevasse filled with murky ice cold water at the bottom. Now imagine being at the top of it and trying to pick your way down without setting loose a rockslide around you.
It was stressful enough that I started crying. We did, however, make it down to the ice, and it turned out to be joyously easy to walk on the ice -- far easier than I had anticipated. The crevasses were small and easy to walk around, and the ice had a thin layer of dirt on it that kept it from getting slippery. We hiked along the moraine edge back to the tip of the ridge, and discovered that the moraine was much higher but significantly less steep there. We hiked back up that way, and I felt a lot better about our prospects. I really hadn't been looking forward to hiking back down to where we started, if we couldn't get across the glacier.
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