The glacier is just a visitor to this valley, and nowhere is this more obvious than at the terminus. Where the glacier has recently been is a jumble of debris where once was order, like the aftermath of Turner visiting his toy box. Hunks of rocks are strewn all over the place, some stranded in high places, some washed continuously in the river, and everywhere in between. Apparently the party is not completely over, as we witnessed a boulder the size of a school bus tumble down the mountain, catching air and doing flips before crashing into the valley floor not far from us. This is where geomorphology comes alive and works on time-scale faster than glacier motion.

Jason and I were up at 6AM yesterday to begin staging equipment for our trip to the terminus, by shuttling a load with the snowmachine. It was a clear day at our camp, but the lower valley was choked with fog. We stopped at our old stream crossing spot, where there is now an active stream thanks to the slush flow. We followed the stream downglacier without crossing it, and eventually came to the site of our second borehole. There was little snow there, but the snow machine was doing fine on the ice. No longer were the ice hummocks the zero-friction bane of our previous travels, but rather now had a crunchy surface thanks to the action of the sun. We made it nearly down to the terminus riding on the ice and dropped off our gear, mainly dataloggers, tools, and hardware for automated monitoring of stream dynamics. On our way back, we crossed the stream to check out the runway. The snow machine made it fine over the water, but Jason got a bit wet as the stream bed was not as solid as it looked. The runway was still in good shape, still with 40 centimeters of snow beneath it.


The slush flow stopped about here, but not before covering our snow machine tracks and knocking over a small stake. (Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out.) Enlarge this panorama

By the time we returned, it was nearly 11AM, and the weather showed signs of change. I had a few phone calls to make before we left, as we would be gone most of the week, and in one of them Dirk told me that a large weather system was moving in from the west and would likely keep us wet for the next few days. Sure enough, by the time we were packed and ready to go, a heavy, wet snow began to fall and reduce visibility to nothing. We decided to wait a while rather than leave in such nasty weather. I think we all thought about staying in the comfort of our current camp until the blue skies returned. But after an hour or so, the snow and rain had stopped and we could see a bit of blue sky, so we decided to go for it. By the time we got suited up and down on the glacier, the fog had returned, but without the precipitation, so we headed off.

The trip down was uneventful and mostly dry, and we soon found our new camp site. Jason and Joey had found this location a few weeks ago, on the other side of the stream from the site we had used the past few years, thankfully preventing a stream crossing. This site had two tent pad that had been cleared some time in the past. At first I thought they were from the 1970s, but having looked around further, I think this spot was under ice at that time, making them sites from the 1990s. Clearly this was a man-made clearing, as there was also a pile of charred survey stakes, leftover from some marshmallow roast. This site was also more centered in the valley, with a very pleasing and symmetrical view of the terminus. By the time we set up our tents, the rains had started again, so we called it a night as it was already quite late.


Not the greatest weather, but not too bad.


Turner: “I got juice!”


Kristin: “I got coffee!”


We arrived at the terminus in weather that seems typical for here, cold and foggy. (Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out.) Enlarge this panorama

Today we got our first taste of stream studying. It was foggy most of the time, with occasional rain, but it wasn’t nasty enough to slow us down too much. Right next to camp there is a place where all of the water from the glacier flows into a single channel, perfect for measuring discharge and water quality. After shuttling a few more loads of gear from the ice edge to camp, over about 300 meters are sharp, loose, slippery rocks, Jason spent most of the afternoon preparing dataloggers to put in the stream. I set up a few time-lapse cameras to provide a visual record of stream variations. We scoped out the river a bit more and try to think through how our studies should shape up, and dropped the instruments in the water before dinner to get a night’s worth of data to ensure they were operating properly.