The #1 competitor with our business is the weather. On this particular day, the wind was blowing 50 mph down the Tazlina glacier and avoiding the bumps was our main objective. The strongest winds are usually isolated to channeled areas through the mountains. It’s not uncommon to have the wind increase from 5 mph to 40 mph in just a couple hundred yards. Sometimes this transition is smooth, and other times it reminds me why you should always cut the cuss buttons off the top of your baseball cap before flying in winds greater than 20 mph.
The black line running down the ice is the middle moraine. The pencil that drew this line is the rock face barely visible through the haze. Rocks rolled down off this face and onto the ice and the movement of the glacier traveling downslope drew this perfectly straight line through the years. Middle moraines almost always indicate a fork in the glacier at a higher elevation.