We have seen glaciers before. I think the first time for me was in Canada. We visited a closed viewpoint in Banff national park. We waded though waist deep snow to peer down on a very blue lake and the grey ice below. Snow was all around, and heavy clouds hung over us. The white of the snow and the grey of the rock is all I recall seeing of the glacier and the ice field beyond. It was cold. We had a way to drive before night and snow fall. The first time Laura tried to turn the car, it slid off the snow covered road and into a gentle snowbank. We turned away from the glacier. Perhaps its more spectacular in summertime, when, you know, its actually open for viewing.
School had a photo of a glacier in France. It looks muddy and was a odd grey-brown colour. Each year a field trip visited it. School had a collection of photos taken from the same spot, year after year. Each year it had retreated many meters. These days I assume the glacier has retreated out of shot. One day it will be gone altogether. Needless to say, this makes me a bit sad.
Perito Moreno is nothing like these. A massive white wall of ice advancing over the valley, it seems otherworldly. It is impossible to fit it all in. Behind the leading wall, the glacier and the ice field behind it stretch to the horizon. Up close, one watches spires of ice fall silently until they hit the water. The boom of impact echoes from the mountains. Enormous cracking noises, like a giant standing on a frozen sea, come from deep within the glacier as it crawls forward. Icebergs bob in the milky water. Semi circles of ice come out from the edge - marking places where the glacier has calved off more chunks. Peering into the cracks, one sees a deep blue white colour, suggesting a impossible maze of chasms and fractures.
The glacier has crawled down out of the Andes. It has hit two problems - a mountain, and a large river. The glacier crawls out into the river. After many months, it reaches the other side and blocks the river. Neither the ice nor the water can erode the mountain fast enough. The water level rises until the pressure undercuts the glacier, leading the river to flow under an arch in the ice. After yet more time, the arch, worn by the water and pressured by the weight of the ice, cracks and explodes, leaving the river to run free once more.
The only way of fully understanding the size of the glacier is to take to the air. The mountain, bigger than anything in Ireland, in barely noticeable in the pictures. The river, large enough to have a detachment of the Argentine navy (no, I don't know why or what they were doing), shrinks on the postcard. The glacier, miles of cracks and wrinkles covering its surface, looks like a unstoppable force, sent down from the Andes to march, Sherman like, over the Patagonian steppe.
Anyway. We have no photos because this whole town gets it's internet by encoding bits into icebergs floating down Argentino Lake . The acks come back in the tourist copies of In Patagonia. If you think the Mylodon is a metaphor for Chatwin's sanity, you are carrying a 1.
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