Ice Crampons hanging at the preparation point before heading onto the Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina…

To make things easier to clamber over the Perito Moreno Glacier on an Ice-trek, we threw on some crampons for the trek. Ok, technically we sat back while the guides threw on the crampons for us. I guess at least this way everyone avoided that ‘tying shoe laces for the first time’ feeling. The crampons sit on the ground, you put your foot (with your regular hiking boot) onto it, then lash it into place with the straps.

Walking around with the crampons takes a little getting used to – it feels more like ‘stomping’ around the glacier rather than trekking. The technique I settled into was putting each foot down firmly and relatively flatly, so that all the spikes did their bit. Going by the steep hills and valleys that we tackled on the glacier, everyone seemed to get the hang of it.

The ice itself was the main attraction – the deep colour blue of the ice was incredible, and looking down into gulleys where meltwater had carved a deep crevice was mesmerizing. Why blue? The red (longer wavelengths) part of the light spectrum is absorbed by the ice – the further the light travels through the ice, the more blue it appears.

In some places where there were large flat areas of glacier surface, meltwater had pooled, but underneath was still areas of solid ice. From the surface it looked like an infinitely deep pool of water, but you could actually stand with your feet on the ice, a tiny bit below the surface of the meltwater. Totally freaky feeling. And highly recommended. Just make sure there is actually solid ice underneath first!

Even after finishing up a Grouse with fresh glacier ice, everyone made it through the remainder of the trek back to dry land. According to another website, the answer to ‘Does Glacier Ice last longer in drinks’, is actually ‘yes’. Apparently because the ice crystals are larger, which in turn melt more slowly. After an energetic hike though, I’m not sure anyone had a chance to notice the extra ice-melt time.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II
1/3200 sec at f/2.8
ISO 100
45mm

Related Posts:

Famous Grouse on the Glacier
Perito Moreno Glacier Trek
Moreno Glacier, Argentina

Bit of a different subject today. It’s not often I get the chance to photograph snowboarders, so when I saw New York was hosting the Red Bull ‘Snowscrapers’, I thought I’d give it a go…

Turned up early which was a fantastic idea – I had a pretty good spot next to the fence between the slope down… and the jump? Forgive me if that’s not the right terminology. I have no clue. Anyway, the not-so-fantastic thing about turning up early was the cold. An hour and half of waiting before it started and I was completely frozen. I’m normally pretty protective of my camera, but in this case it was every camera for itself, out there frozen hanging around my neck.

I took along the 45mm TS-E tilt shift lens and a couple of spare batteries that I was keeping next to my body for warmth – at least if the one in the camera packed up because of the cold I’d have some hot-swaps (no pun intended). As it turned out, I was impressed by the performance of the one in the camera. It must have been roughly minus one trillion degrees out there, but it still stuck at about 50% charge for the whole time, and I didn’t have to switch.

Anyway, the shot above is of the approach – with Shaun White (I think) doing the approaching. Amazing what you learn about someone on Wikipedia – how he used to be called the Flying Tomato, how he’s mentioned in Ocean’s 13, or how he has a signature trick called the ‘Armadillo’. Nice. Oh and he got an Olympic Gold at age 19. Got totally sidetracked reading the Rolling Stone article as you can probably tell.

Anyways… the snowboarders were travelling so fast that I was kept warm just trying to keep up with manually focusing the TS-E and trying to compose the shot. I always like a breath of fresh air now and again… photographically speaking, and just getting to do something completely different like shooting snowboarders in a New York park, was pretty cool.

Anyway, been a bit quiet recently, working on a series of photos which I’ll hopefully have finished soon. Urm, no promises though. heh.

Oh also, one thing I thought was cool – that thing on the right of the slope where you can see the people huddled half way down is some kind of advanced catapult as far as I could tell. Actually for the main event they didn’t seem to be using it that much – they’d migrated to the ‘get two guys to throw the boarder off the top’ method, but in the warm-up they had a water-skiing kind of setup and it literally yanked the boarder down the hill so they could get up more speed for the jump.

Fingers thawed slightly now…

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/250 sec at f/2.8
ISO 1000
45mm (Tilt shift)