Athabasca Glacier

Here's Athabasca Glacier, descending from the Columbia Icefield. Doesn't this scene look wild, primeval, and cold? I put my parka to good use here. This was my second visit to the glacier; the first was in 1972. It's just amazing for a Californian to behold the masses of ice here. It's majestic and awesome to see nature in its absolute raw state.

OK, geologists, here's a lateral moraine. The glacier has retreated about a mile in the past 150 years and left, frankly, a mess behind. There are

piles of rock debris over a vast area which used to be under ice. The rock ridge in the foreground is the lateral moraine, left behind on the side of the glacier as the ice retreated. Interpolating between the signs marking the position of the glacier's snout in 1948 and 1982, I took this picture from about where the snout was when I visited in 1972; it's retreated about 200-300 yards since then.

Here's the front of the glacier. A cold wind blows down from the icefield almost continuously, just like it does in Greenland and Antarctica. In '72 I took a snowcat tour out on the glacier and I remembered that cold wind. This time I had my parka.