Glaciers. As you travel north, the first one you see tells you that you have well and truly reached the subarctic region. You can scratch that off your bucket list.
It is summer, but a vast sheet of ice covers all but the peaks of the mountains towering in front of you. Or maybe, instead of covering the mountains, the ice comes down between peaks on the left and peaks on the right and combines into a bigger sheet aimed down into a valley. Or maybe a long, slender blue-white river winds down a deep canyon—a river with no current except for the stream flowing out of its bottom.
Massive and implacable, glaciers exist only here in this vast, beautiful, and unforgiving country. And this is their world. They belong. You exist here only as an awed spectator.
Rain and snow fall on the mountains and the water tries to flow downhill. In bitter subarctic cold, though, it freezes and over centuries of geologic time forms into glaciers. The water still makes its way down hill, but instead of flowing water, mountains of ice move at a pace that can only be called, well… glacial. You do not see them move. But they do.
Glaciers slide, ever so slowly, grinding and abrading the rock beneath them into fine particles that permeate their ice. Every spring some of the ice on the front of the glacier melts and a massive flood cascades down, carrying particles of ground rock. As the water slows and fans out from the base of the glacier the particles fall out. Over the centuries they accumulate into a terminal moraine, a broad fan of finely ground rock sprawling out from the base of the glacier.
