The old-fashioned flying boat lumbered through the dark river like a bathtub
dragged by dolphins. Surely this hunk of junk could never get airborne?
But then, suddenly, we were aloft, and soaring over temperate rainforests,
salmon-choked rivers and mountain ranges with peaks so remote they may never
be conquered.
Alaska is an adventurer’s playground: so beautiful it cannot be described, and
so wild that you take your life in your hands every time you journey into
the interior.
My three-week voyage here had a particular purpose – to follow one of the
state’s immense glaciers from its ice-field source to where it calved into
the sea.
On the way, I planned to penetrate a moulin, one of the bottomless ice caves
that suck freezing waterfalls into the guts of a glacier. The aim was to try
to get a handle on how global warming is affecting this fragile and
immensely important environment.
Our flying boat landed on a river close to Alaska’s capital, Juneau, a small
town surrounded by mist-teased mountains, its deep-water channels choked
with the cruise ships that arrive to give tourists a sanitised taste of
wilderness. People catch helicopters here like we catch the bus, so two
whirlybirds carried our party high onto the Juneau ice field, where
centuries of snow is compressed into many glaciers, all tumbling away like
rivers towards the sea.
We pitched our tents on the ice of the Gilkey glacier – a slippery surface on
which to make camp.
Over the coming weeks, sun and wind would scorch away the ice around our
tents, Yukon Territory to leave us sleeping on ice-plateaux 2ft high, our
noses getting closer to the tent ceiling every night. We would be
undertaking a whole bunch of real science to assess the effects of climate
change, but more compelling for me was the evidence of my own eyes.
Photographs just a few decadesColumbiaBritish old show how the ice has
receded – places that were under 300ft of white are now flower-filled alpine
meadows.
For hard proof, though, we needed to get right inside a glacier – into a
moulin. Moulins are a glacier’s plumbing. During the summer, surface
meltwaters become rushing white-water rivers, and when these find a weakness
– often a crevasse – they burrow deep into the body of ice, creating tunnels
and chutes. Global warming has increased the size and number of moulins, and
these would be my gateway to the glacier’s core.
This seems like absolute lunacy – glaciers contain thousands of tons of moving
ice, creating unimaginable forces. At night, you can hear them creaking and
cracking as they move. Being on top of one is threatening enough; going
inside would surely be suicide.
Moulins are generally terrifying places, sometimes hundreds of feet deep,
containing thunderous waterfalls that plunge into the unstable belly of the
ice mass. As a mountaineer, the merest glimpse of one sends a shudder down
your spine; you find a way to trudge around it, perhaps tentatively peering
over the edge. And yet their insides are among the most eerily beautiful
places on earth, and you can be pretty confident that every crampon point
you place represents the first step that’s ever been taken there.
The ice inside these caverns has been compressed over thousands of years, and
is flawless, all the air and impurity crushed out by the millenniums. It is
so hard that even with axes and crampons honed as sharp as carving knives,
it feels like trying to pierce concrete. Climbing in and out often involves
heavy overhangs, and once inside, you must rely on traverses, bridging
clumsily across the tunnels to avoid the torrent below.
I’d be making my attempt alongside cameraman-supremo Keith Partridge, the man
responsible for the iconic mountaineering film Touching the Void. Keith is
one of the most deeply competent people I’ve ever worked with. His capacity
to be crystal calm in a crisis, and to improvise a rope system out of torn
shoelaces and old sweetie wrappers, had always left me feeling utterly
secure. It also helped that he could hold a high-definition camera rock
steady while dangling on a rope balanced on a single crampon point, twisted
backwards next to a scudding waterfall.
We armed ourselves with underwater cameras and helmet-cams, the only kit
capable of catching our descent into the world’s coldest plughole. Wish us
luck.
The second Keith and I eased into the cavern entrance, the sky was a distant
memory and the temperature plummeted. Instantly, we were encased like frozen
cavemen in impossibly blue ice.
The first vertical chute dropped away into an overhanging ceiling, and as I
pitched over the edge, I was sent swinging sideways, becoming trapped under
a waterfall of mind-shattering cold.
Within minutes, I felt myself going into shock. My fingers wouldn’t work at
all, I couldn’t get my axes into anything. I was going under with alarming
speed.
I struggled to get my ascenders on while bouncing out from the ice wall to try
to keep out of the waterfall, but my brain was totally scrambled by the
cold. Eventually, I half-climbed and was half-hauled out, having had a nasty
shock and a big wake-up call.
After rethinking our rope systems somewhat, we chose an even more magnificent
moulin, its gaping maw channelling a river with a deafening waterfall that
made everyone think of the mythical Styx, surging into the depths of hell.
Teetering on the frontpoints of my crampons, I abseiled down into the
streamway and began to progress into the depths; Keith following close
behind.
It’s kind of like caving, but much more committing. Every surface around you
is as slippery as... well, ice. The water raging into your boots is as cold
as... well, ice. You get the picture. After ducking through a hole
whirlpooled with raging water, we popped into another tunnel, now 100ft
underground. Sunlight still penetrated from above, though, painting a
spooky, hyper-real blueness onto every ice formation. Here, the walls were
like uncut sapphires, carved and shaped into exquisite jewelled sculptures.
It’s very tempting to let yourself be carried away by the intense,
otherworldly beauty of the place, to become intoxicated by the sheer, deep
colours of it, but this is not an arena that allows complacency. Keith is
one of the world’s most respected mountain cameramen – his previous job
involved being heli-dropped onto the north face of the Eiger – but he
described our moulin as the most challenging place he had ever filmed.
The noise of thundering water meant every word had to be yelled; communication
with the surface was out of the question.
And then, the very worst-case scenario became a reality. As I hung by a single
axe, gazing down into the depths below, a crampon scraped off down the wall
like nails down a blackboard, my axe popped out of the ice, and I toppled
backwards into the water. I was washed away down the flume like a kid at a
waterpark.
Keith’s camera was still rolling, recording me engulfed in a maelstrom of
seething white water and then disappearing into blackness. Utter chaos
followed. Keith was yelling for me, the crew up top were mobilising for
rescue, all convinced I’d bitten the big one. It was madness. Meanwhile, I’d
been flushed into the biggest, iciest toilet in the world.
Far down the tunnel, the waterway kinked sideways and scythed down into a
whirlpool. I managed to lodge myself there with elbows and knees, just above
the drop, as burning-cold water poured into my wetsuit and through my boots.
My fingers were useless and the breath was driven out of me like a punch in
the guts.
Cold sucks your senses dry, robs you of the power to act, renders strength and
fitness redundant. I looked beneath me. Beyond the whirlpool was the deep,
deep blue of a tunnel that must run for miles beneath the glacier. Certain
and quite sudden death waited there. I had to move, and move very quickly.
Summoning every morsel of power the cold had spared me, I hammered my axe into
the ice ahead, and hauled against the current. And then another axe... and
another pull... and finally I could get some purchase with a crampon. On my
hands and knees in the flow, I crawled back up the tunnel, to where Keith
was waiting, frankly terrified. He’d captured the whole magnificent tumble
on camera, but thought he’d seen me perish.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” he yelled. “Now!” Back at the surface, with
blue lips and waxy blue skin, the only thing that distinguished me from a
corpse was the comedy shivering, my teeth chattering like a chipmunk with a
twitch. As my expedition comrades fussed around me, filling me with hot tea
and massaging my ice-block fingers into life, a watery sun glinted off the
ice, and cronking ravens squatted on the rocks, laughing at the man who had
tried to take on the might of the glacier. And failed.
Travel details: most people cruise along the Alaskan coast, visiting
the glaciers on a shore excursion – see www.discover-cruises.co.uk.
Alternatively, try a tailor-made specialist: Audley Travel (01993 838000, www.audleytravel.com)
has a 15-day self-drive trip from £2,995pp, with a full day’s guided glacier
hike, and flights from Heathrow to Anchorage (via Seattle) with BA. Or try
North America Travel Service (0113 243 0000, www.northamericatravelservice.co.uk).
— Steve Backshall’s programme Expedition Alaska is scheduled to appear on May
26 on the Discovery channel
