Edward Helfers
The Glacier never rests. The work is too vast, the pressure too intense. Imagine the weight of one million bodies bearing down on your back. Now multiply that figure one hundred-fold. The ensuing sum is only a fraction of the sheer force under which The Glacier advances—dutifully, incrementally—on a round-the-clock basis. The Glacier has never asked gravity for a day off, never called in sick or accumulated leave. The duration and quality of your vacation fail to register in the grander geologic scheme. Unlike you, The Glacier has perspective.
Complaints of treacherous terrain will go unheard. Cries for help will fold into silence. There will be no beginner route, no easy-access overlook for selfie-taking tourists. Read the signs. Heed the warnings. Loose rock. Sudden gusts. Quicksand. The Glacier is not here for your entertainment, not here to populate your Instagram feed. Facebook means nothing to a slowly moving river of ice.
In English, n. Glacier (/'glā-shƏr/ also -zhƏr also /'gla-sē-Ə/) derives from the Savoy dialect glacière (moving mass of ice) from the Old French glace (ice) from the Vulgar Latin glacia likely suffixed from the Latin gel (cold, to freeze). At no point in the etymological record do iterations suggest paved access roads or adequate sanitary accommodations. By every definition, the word denotes dangerous conditions.
Oddmoon882 writes, "We hiked out in the driving cold wet rain and felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment. The Glacier is amazing!" Five stars.
"Just wow," adds Vigilante6. "Picture a giant marble altar with ribbons of ash and silica. No words for the spectrum of sunset colors." Five stars.
"Definitely a worthwhile destination," NightNomad observes. "Word to the wise: budget at least three hours round-trip and take your time. The trail has a way of disappearing." Four and a half stars.
Many people revere The Glacier. Home to dragons, elves, spirits, and trolls, The Glacier has appeared in legend as omen, haven, idol. In Scandinavia, Vikings staged their greatest sagas on similar slopes, awed by the endless imagination of nature. In Tibet, monks trek miles across the moraine to present Chinlab offerings, woven receptacles filled with spring water and herbs. Their hope is to heal the earth, to restore good qualities from a primal era, to stave off inevitable decay. While their methods have failed to turn back time, their example proves instructive to the secular consumerists of the world, more specifically affluent twenty-something Americans whose bucket-list wanderlust has trivialized the meaning of majesty.
Fact: The Glacier has spent hundreds of thousands of years shaping rock.
Fact: Not slate or limestone or weakly bound metamorphics but grade A igneous spawned by volcanic vents.
Fact: The chilling tongues of The Glacier sliver into canyons, open new orifices, spit ice-flecked rivers into flood plains that carry out to sea.
Fact: The Glacier could fuck you up.
Questions to consider before posting inaccurate/potentially hurtful messages online: What if The Glacier could feel? What if The Glacier could think? What if The Glacier was not a singular feature but instead one thread in a larger sentient sheet? What if thousands of years ago, alien intelligence concocted The Glacier as an hourglass of sorts, a way of measuring hubris, a fire alarm or computer simulation meant to signal the possibility of repopulation? What if all this time, The Glacier was secretly plotting revenge?
"Mist greased the switchbacks pretty good," writes Michael V28. "Hiking boots are a must. If you follow the cairns for a few kilometers, you can walk right up to the edge. Not really a religious person, but I would describe the sensation as spiritual." Five stars.
Rememory1234 remarks that The Glacier, "looked like wood finish from a distance . . . the mix of dirt and ice under a sunny blue sky was spectacular . . . you feel like you are walking on a desert moon." Five stars.
"Have to say I disagree," notes Riffraff7. "Two plus hours schlepping through ankle-deep driveway gravel for a ho-hum view. Hard no on the kid/pet-friendly tags." Two stars.
April 13th, 2012: Two Swiss climbers attempt to summit The Glacier. They are fit, ambitious, well-trained, young but experienced enough to take the proper precautions. They don helmets and crampons, layer with waterproof windbreakers, with down jackets and thermal undergarments; they carry oxygen and flares and digital beacons designed to withstand avalanche. They leave the parking lot at first light, trek seven hours across scree fields and ghost ice before setting camp some 1,500 meters high. That evening, the blizzard hits with little warning.
Officially, The Glacier has claimed thirteen human lives—Bjoern Hanson, Gron McGrew, Elsie Esselager, James Sims, Karen Sims, Antonio Magro-Hernandez, Jesus de Jesus, Marcus Deniet, Leo Deniet, Christian Deniet, Sophia Deniet, Amelie Deniet, and Franklin Grupo-Deniet. Unofficially, the number is much higher. Causes of death, obscured in human obituaries, include asphyxiation, hypothermia, exhaustion, cerebral hypoxia, and blunt force trauma. While such tragedies are covered with great sobriety, accompanied by pictures of handmade crosses, floral bouquets, and neon signs staked in the snow, every death, reporters forget, offsets roughly 500 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
April 22nd, 2012: Two Swiss climbers fail to board their plane home. Local authorities quickly mobilize. A search team soon discovers the tent, a neon orange dome staked to a section of The Glacier known locally as rangar forsendur (false ledge). The door is unzipped, fabric flapping like a prayer flag. A cursory inspection of the site turns up a dated map with cryptic markings, none of which match the footprints tapering off in many directions, as if the men had hoped to avoid detection. Over the next week, drone pilots scour one crevasse after another; alpine specialists worm through cold blue caves; encouraged by the discovery of a potato chip bag floating in a nearby lagoon, scuba divers probe the murky depths, cocooned in dry suits, unable to see through foggy masks what lies beyond narrow flashlight cones. After each expedition, they surface near the source, floating on their backs like sea otters as they study the nooks and crannies of ice floes looming overhead, no doubt filled with a sense of futility, humbled by the enormousness of their task, unaware of the great many mysteries submerged meters below.
To put it another way, anyone who leaves The Glacier bodily intact might consider themselves lucky. Gratitude would seem the appropriate emotional response. The capacity to evaluate The Glacier pseudonymously online, as though The Glacier were a defective product or unsatisfactory lover, is itself a benevolence The Glacier has permitted.
In Icelandic, n. Jökull (ˈjœ-kʏtl) derives from Old Norse Jo̧kull from the Proto-Germanic jekulaz/jikilaz (icicle) from the hypothesized root jaki (a piece of ice, breaking ice). Even at the time of its earliest human conception, The Glacier was already fractured, fracturing like language to fill new voids, new valleys, to unbecome in the process of becoming.
"One word," writes Anonymous 376. "Sublime." Five stars.
"This was by far the spookiest part of our trip," writes VanessaVanLife. "The Glacier looked like a frozen tidal wave. Every time I heard it creak, this voice in the back of my head shouted, RUN FOR THE HILLS!" Three and a half stars.
"The Glacier helped me reconnect with my father," writes Danosaur17. Five stars.
"TLDR," writes AudreyOverAndOut. "I mean fine if you have five hours to burn, but whitewater rafting was better. Honestly I've had more fun at turnpike truck stops." One star.
Though deadly, The Glacier harbors important clues to human survival. Bewitched by its slow-steady wrath, climatologists extract ice cores encrypted with evidence of extinct vegetation, of carbon concentration in relation to temperature variation. The Glacier, some theorize, contains deadly bacteria that, once released, will ensure the end of all living beings. Bubbles trapped deep inside divulge atmospheric hints that have permitted mankind to peer far into the future, a future in which mankind has no place. And yet, despite this knowledge, scientists continue to take samples, to log their findings and publish their data on the off chance that others will learn how to listen.
Maybe The Glacier grows tired of its powerlessness in this conversation. Maybe its patience wears thin. Rumblings and fissures, groans and echoes, the click-click-click of calving shelves—maybe The Glacier communicates in chatter all its own, much like the dolphins cruising beyond the grasp of its furthest fangs. Maybe a translator would tell us that said dolphins remind The Glacier of its stationary status. Maybe, out of envy, the Glacier takes great pains to deter travel, which only has the opposite effect, attracting adrenaline junkies intent on conquering the most inhospitable climes, thankless trust funders for whom even a trip to Mars might register a shrugging sigh. Maybe The Glacier would prefer to be left alone.
April 30th, 2002: Two Swiss climbers are presumed dead. Citing survival statistics and long-term resource allocation, local authorities downgrade the active search. In a three-minute press conference, no further details are divulged. A select few relatives—two uncles, a cousin, a wife—return to the Glacier every couple years, retracing imagined steps, revisiting probable locations, resigned to reality yet hopeful that somehow fresh ruptures will reveal a small consolation, a token of the bodies they refuse to forget.
Fact: Depending on how you define its boundaries, the Glacier contains approximately 998 km3 of ice.
Fact: Assuming atmospheric pressure at sea level and a temperature of 4.3 C˚, a single km3 of ice weighs .91659028 gigatons (GT), putting the Glacier at 914.757104 GT.
Fact: While ablation models vary, experts estimate that the Glacier loses on average five million tons annually, the equivalent of 34,000 Olympic-Sized swimming pools. If recent emission trends continue, the melt rate is likely to increase anywhere from three- to six-fold in the next decade.
Fact: The Glacier will not always be here.
Then again, perhaps the Glacier was never here to begin with, its form forever unsettling, perpetually reorganizing, evaporating or accumulating at the whims of weather, released like clouds into volumes of volatility, shadows of familiar shapes—horse, bone, timber—unbound by the limitations of intransigent matter. One day, between seventy-five and twelve thousand years from now, a future that still includes mankind but just barely, people will say, remember that Glacier? Remember how big? Remember how beautiful? Remember the ridges and contours? Remember how it hung like a bedsheet across mountain peaks? How moonlight softened the brittle flow? How snowmelt pools spaced across the floodplain took on the color of the sky? How a maze of eskers traced the path of least resistance? How its veins glistened against obsidian? How a thing so immense and imposing could be reduced to a single sliver? Remember when its soothing vapor filled your lungs instead of ash? When the fires that burn incessantly could still be extinguished? When the wounds of this earth were not fatal? Remember when these droughts and this suffering did not exist, when nature, untested and naïve, had not yet learned how to defeat its greatest antagonist?