Soooooooooo Big!

I know I am a bit behind in the telling of my Lake Joyce story. In order to give you a more accurate account of my first impressions of the area, here is an excerpt from my journal:

“Welcome to Pearce Valley. Huge – that is the only way to describe it! The mountains on all sides are gargantuan! The edge of the Taylor glacier completely dominates one view with gorgeous peaks rising up behind it. A

nd I don’t mean peaks at a distance – they are right there! Huge! The landscape is so vast, yet so close. It almost looks artificial – like a backdrop using forced perspective. It catches each glance and makes me LOOK. I don’t think I have ever seen such a dramatic mountainous landscape.”

As you can probably tell, I am prone to being a bit excited. But trust me – this valley is stunningly beautiful. As I said in my journal, the view at one end of the valley is dominated by the Taylor Glacier.

With a cliff edge 100 feet high, the glacier rises up several hundred feet above that. The lake, which sits right up against the glacier, is a work of art itself.

A smooth rim of ice runs around the edge: a misleadingly calm introduction to the network of sharp spires, pillars, and tables of ice that rise up in another concentric ring toward the center. The very center of the lake is a ring of slippery smooth bulges and pond-like depressions. I’ll take you on a tour of the ice in a later post!

Lake Joyce sits down in a bowl, with walls formed by the glacier on one side, and steep walls of loose rock on the others. Up the steep slope from the lake, our tents sit where the valley floor levels off. Every day as I crest that slope running up from the lake to our main camp, I am stunned by the spectacular view in the other direction!

Part of the Asgard Mountain Range looms above us, and we can see several of the peaks in their entirety, rising from their bases in our valley all the way up to their rock-cropped tops. To my right as I walk up that slope from the lake, the closest hills are covered in glaciers, one per hill.

Though they look small from down here, especially when compared to everything else, I have a feeling that if I made the trek up there, they also have 100 ft cliffs showing.

I find myself constantly frustrated by the fact that no camera of mine is going to capture the vast scale of the landscape sufficiently to share it with you. Each photo feels a bit cliché – nature has been cropped and minimized. My only hope is that the awesome BBC folks whom I met in McMurdo will make it down this way with their high-tech cameras and a helicopter, and I can just refer you to the correct episode of Frozen Planet. What joy their jobs must be: to bring the beauty of places like this to everyone who cares to witness it from their living rooms!