Glaciers

The Argentiere Glacier is almost 9 km long and 1.5 km wide in the widest spot.  It's been there for thousands of years and will be there for thousands more.  Glaciers are amazing masses of ice, capable of telling such a story, and every so often, they spit out some tourist that tried to prove Darwin wrong.

I'm standing in our backyard here in Chamonix;  for anyone that hasn't had the pleasure, it is one of the most sublime places on the planet.  I have a glass of wine in my hand that some American claims is perfect, by some coincidence, there's a British woman that agrees.  I would never try and tell someone that wine or anything else is perfect, it happens to be subjective and personal.  To me, wine is simple, you would either buy the bottle again or you wouldn't.  I would definitely buy this one again.  It's not the wine that is capturing my attention, it's the river.

We have this boulder in the stream that creates a small eddy behind it, the eddy is our dunk pool.  From the hot tub, it is a short dash to a nice 3 C glacial stream, the Arve.  Due to the warm temperatures, the Arve has been higher than usual and deposited just about the right amount of silty sand behind the rock, creating a nice little beach.  You see, the Arve is almost exclusively glacial run off, where we are it is from the the Argentiere and Le Tour Glaciers.  A bit further down, the Mer de Glace dumps it share from the Mont Blanc Massif.  What strikes me as I stare at it is that it doesn't even know I'm here.  I'm sure there is some militant global warming geek that's about to tell me that it will be gone in 5, 10 or 50 years, but he clearly can't do the math and interpret the laws of thermodynamics.  The thought that leaps into my head, is that some of the water going by me has been waiting for 10,000 years or more to be reintroduced into the cycle of nature.  It's on its way to Lac Leman, then onto the Med.  Somewhere along the way, it will get picked up again and fall as precipitation.  Maybe some of it will get caught in a thermal current and end up at the bottom of the Atlantic for another 10,000 years or more.

So what?  Well I think my point is that we're basically irrelevant.  I'm about to travel half way around our planet to climb a mountain and I'll be walking over some of the biggest glaciers in the world.  Why?  I guess its part of what makes me tick.  People have told me lately that I have a good life, I can't argue with that.  I think I feel sorry for the people who don't know what makes them tick.  The thought that really sticks with me is that once I'm gone and my grandkids or the next mutation of the human race is standing beside this river, it still won't know we're here.  Enjoy it while you're here.

D