Cols and a cave

I thought that I had done with indenting last week but it seems that it is not my destiny to get away with it so easily. I thought it was a little harsh for poor old Hazel to have to do her medical indent and the food indent all by herself so I volunteered to help her out with both of them. I am NOT looking forward to the food indent but the medical indent was actually OK. I was able to ask a lot of questions as to what the drugs and bits of kit did and Hazel, being the very good teacher that she is, explained their use to me very patiently. We did have to have quite a lot of loud music to push us through though. Also I got a lesson in unpronounceable drugs which will never be useful but it gave me something to do while she was finding the use by dates. I can also now say Sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff) which I have never been able to do before.

Yesterday was a perfect day. Every walk that we have done so far I have thought that we couldn’t top but yesterday I think was my favourite of all. Rod, Hazel Jo Cox (GO), Erny and I all set out into the bright, crisp, cold, almost painfully beautiful day to climb Glacier Col.

Breakfast view

Glacier Col

 It was a little windy but we arrived to just below the Col in good time. Once there we were meandering our way up when we spotted an ice cave. Or more to the point, an ice arch. It must be a relic of the glacier and is covered on the top by bits of moraine. However you can walk all the way through and when we did so we could see right through the ice. At eye level it was full of little bubbles of gas and at the bottom it was completely clear and you could see every single pebble trapped in it right back through to where the light no longer reached. It was absolutely incredible and made me feel so utterly tiny to think that I was looking at pebbles that had been trapped for thousands of years. It really was stunning.

Ice Cave 1

Ice Cave 2

Thinking that we couldn’t really top that we continued up to the Col and found a land of ice and snow. It is a bowl of wind sculpted snow and ice with a ridge at its back. Erny, who had lugged his skis all the way up just for this, promptly got into his ski boots and started skiing while we went up the ridge to have a look down the other side.                                                                                                                   

Crazy Skier

                      It was incredibly icy and slippery. It was so slippery that if you were on a bad bit when the wind gusted you had to make sure that you didn’t slide too far. We decided not to go too far because it wouldn’t be safe without crampons and an ice axe but we did manage to look down on the Lyell Glacier which had a very forbidding cloud hanging over it. I felt like I was on top of the world, it was glorious.

 

Looming over the Lyell

Today (Sunday) we decided that we would have a short walk. Unfortunately it turned into a bit of an epic one. We went up to Deadman’s Pass and then up to No Name Col. To get up the Col we had to put on our crampons and get out our ice axes (we had learned from Saturday) and make our way gingerly up what we have renamed Fear Gully.

 

Fear Gully

 It was Jo’s second ever time on crampons and I am not entirely sure how much she enjoyed it. I had been in crampons for a couple of weeks over the summer last year and was surprised how quickly I remembered how to walk in them. We didn’t need them for long though and once we were up in the Col we hurriedly sat down and had lunch looking over West Cumberland Bay. We decided that we didn’t have time to do Stenhouse Peak (luckily because I didn’t really like the look of it) and since going back down the way we had come up was not an option we traversed the valley and made our way back through Boulder Pass, thereby completing our weekend’s tour of cols.

The snow, except where it had been blown into sheet ice, was perfect, a real joy to walk on and I am looking forward to more of this type of walking. I know that everyone wants a big dump of snow but I am very happy like this. The snow will come though, at some point, it will come.