Ice one, bro
I was amped to get on the water. After waking up Kai and Kevin who were fast asleep in the dark lower cabin, we pumped up our inflatables and headed over to explore the glacier. It looked as though it was only a couple hundred meters away, but the further we paddled over the icy water, the further away it seemed to get, punctuating just how huge this mass of ancient ice really is. The glacier creaks and groans as the ice is constantly shifting and cracking. The sounds echo through the valley, with the big cracks sounding exactly like thunder. Every minute or so a chunk of ice of varying sizes would break off the face of the glacier and slap into the water with a loud splash.
The bigger pieces made pretty sizable swells that would run out from the glacier. We paddled across the face of the glacier for over an hour, waiting patiently for bigger and bigger calving of the chunks of ice. There was a huge crack on the left face, and we figured sooner or later that whole piece was going to go. It did. First a pretty large chunk fell into the sea, signaling the beginning of the collapse, so Kai and I paddled as fast as we could over to the left, which is pretty tricky navigation over and around the ice in the water. The inflatables were perfect, but the blade of my paddle afterwards looked as though I had been hitting it against stones for an hour.
