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Published: December 2nd 2007
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Moose on the Glacier!
There were very few bones left. The Brady Glacier is an icefield - a huge sheet of ice. The key word here is ‘sheet’. If you think of alpine and valley glaciers as being frozen waterfalls and rivers of ice then you would think of an icefield as being an upside down dinner plate of ice. There is a large portion of an icefield that is closer to flat than it is to being ‘mountainous’. They are not really flat, but they get close. And you’ll see this in the photos: often the horizon doesn’t look ‘straight’. It’s not that the photo is crooked! It’s the gently sloping icefield sloping off toward the ocean.
Some of the ice in an icefield comes from valley glaciers; some comes from accumulated snow falling on the icefield itself. The south end of the Brady icefield reaches almost to the ocean but the high center portion of the ‘dinner plate’ is about 800 meters elevation. In winter the snow covers the entire thing, but in summer it melts back at the lowest elevations. The ‘zone of accumulation’ is that portion of the glacier where the snow doesn’t melt, and ice builds up. The Brady icefield gets a lot of ice
added to it each year from the dozens of valley glaciers that feed into it, but it also has its own zone of accumulation above about 600 meters.
Although the Brady Glacier is huge, it is not easy to get to. There are no roads, no airports. Helicopters are not allowed in wilderness areas, small planes with skis can land on the glaciers but these are very expensive to charter. So we used the route that went by ‘Spur Lake’. We camped the night next to the icefield and got up early the next day. We did a day hike on the ice, getting back to the tent the same evening. The captions on the photos tell the story.
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Olga
non-member comment
Mosses
I'm interested in mosses on ice of glacier. I like your report with photos of mosses. It is a good information!