Around the World in 180 Days: Viedma

The morning we set out on the Viedma glacier trip we were woken up by a puppy whining and jumping outside the window. After letting it in it chewed on my hand, my sock, then crawled under a bed and fell deeply asleep. Even when it was time to go and it needed to leave the room, when I picked it up it just rolled on its back as if to say 'you can pet my stomach if you want as long as I don't have to wake up' so I picked it up like a baby, with its back on my forearm and its head lolling on my hand and passed it out the door. Once it was deposited on the ground it rolled over and went back to sleep.
Our New York friends also happened to be on the glacier tour, and there were maybe thirty other people as well. Took a bus maybe 25 minutes to one of the milky-blue glacier lakes, then a boat to the glacier. They informed us that if it was too windy at the glacier or the waves too rough the boat would turn around, but we were lucky and the gusts--while strong enough to carry me a foot or two backwards when I jumped (I tested this) or knock me over if I was unprepared--didn't hinder the boat.
The whitecaps were beautiful, breaking just as they were blown backwards into a cloud of iridescent shards. We arrived at the glacier about an hour and a half after getting on the boat and I decided upon a new definition of ice blue. I have always considered it to be pale, almost white, cold blue but here we saw so many variations. Many of the ice chunks floating in the water or attached to the glacier were of such a deep blue as to be celestial. I learned these blues came when there were no bubbles in the ice, for the same reason that the sky is blue.
The boat landed on a smooth stone rise that a part of the glacier had passed over decades before, wearing it slippery. We divided into groups of English-speakers and Spanish-speakers, and went to where the rock met the glacier to attach crampons to our feet and gloves to our hands. Everybody except for one person went on the Viedma Trek, and we were able to watch the Viedma Pro-er climbing a pinnacle at one point (see yesterday's apparently random photo).
Crampons fit easily over your shoes and are perfect for gripping the glassy ice, but the trick is to trust them enough to step on a surface that looks like it wants nothing more than to send you plummeting towards the rocks then sliding into the icy lake. The first ascent was nerve-wracking.
Glaciers from a distance area little disappointing. I have really limited experience with them, and so imagine them to be these pristine masses of white, not masses of white covered with dirt and rocks. But walking on the rocks and you feel that you could be suspended in space. The ice glows blue, and the rocks aren't densely packed so it feels like you are walking on a thin layer of debris suspended in nothingness--like if you could walk on the rings of saturn or walk on the milky way as it appear from earth.
Since the glaciers are always changing when they're this close to the water we were lucky to have an ice tunnel open and safe to go into. The tunnel was gorgeous, with silky smooth undulating walls, shimmering bubbles trapped in the surface, and in the walls delicate and brittle-seeming structures of trapped air making snowflakes behind the glass. Coming out wet from the incessant dripping from the ceiling, we wait for everybody to have their turn going in and examine the numerous streams coming from the depths of the glacier.
To get to the ice tunnel we walked across a narrow path between to crevasses and, embarassingly, everybody strolled along while I inched past, a guide at my side, to prevent being blown into the depths.
The adults had a surprise when bits of some clean ice were hacked off and put into glasses filled with something called Bailey's Irish Cream, which I only had a taste of but can assure you that it tastes foul. The ice used to make this was probably 400-500 years old. It felt rather disrespectful to be using it in a drink.
Viedma glacier would not be not so high (300 meters above sea level) nor so cold (quite balmy) as to be worthy of being the third-largest ice-mass in the world were it not for the pacific ocean and the mountains. The ocean blows snow into the moutains, which compresses gradually into ice, which begins to move across the land. On the edge the glacier is estimated to be at least 300 meters deep, and quite a bit more in the middle. I would have thought the ice used in the drinks to be a lot younger than 400 years, but apparently all the snow that has settled since than has melted.
Viedma is currently shrinking. They think it to be losing 2 meters per year and only gaining 1. Other glaciers in the area, though, such as Purito Moreno have a perfect balance and grown considerably in the last century.
Once taking of our crampons and gloves (for the roughness of the ice, not the cold) we scrambled back down the rock and ate lunch at the side of the lake. The boatride back was uneventful, as was the busride, and in the evening we went out for pizza again. Walking home my mom stopped for ice-cream, and again it was so windy as to make a brisk jog slow to a crawl, moving backwards if both feet were lifted from the ground at once. I don't think I mentioned this yesterday, but all the days in El Chalten the weather variated through stages of windy and was unusually so for the time of the year.
Disappointingly the puppy didn't make another appearance.