Question: What did it feel like to camp on a glacier in Alaska?

Kate Salmon answered on 10 Mar 2014:

Camping on a glacier was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done! We had a kitchen tent where we had to spend a few hours digging into the snow to create some steps down into the kitchen, and we also carved some seats out of the snow. We used this as a place to gather all together at night/morning to eat and to shelter from storms. We also had a toilet shelter too which we had to make out of snow and we took all of our waste with us (including our poo!) Glaciers are always moving; some move fast (a few metres per day) and others are slower (a few cm per day) so it was strange knowing that despite having the same campsite, we were slowly moving down the valley. Glaciers also cause a lot of erosion in the mountains because they are constantly moving and scraping away at the rock on either side of the valley. I remember how silent it was but we could hear rockfall from miles away- it sounded like a car driving over gravel. There is also an optical illusion when you are on a glacier so that you can’t tell how large things are or how far distances are. This means that when you start walking towards something, you may think it will only take you ~2 hours to reach it but it can actually take something like ~16 hours! Sometimes we would set out from our camp to climb a mountain and actually never make it to the top because we had underestimated how long it would take to climb!