ambergesa: Isabelle Glacier Hike

I snuck in a couple more "firsts" yesterday by hiking to see my "first glacier" near Ward, Colorado. Cindy and I hiked to see Lake Isabelle and Isabelle Glacier which sit at about 11,500 feet on the front range of the Rockies, just a short drive west from Boulder. This hike has ranked itself as my favorite hike I've done in Colorado so far.

At the risk of revealing my lack of intelligence, my mental image of a glacier is a large chunk of ice that sits in icy sea waters, testing the abilities of ship captains to steer around them and avoid becoming another "Titanic". Because I paid more attention to the movies and not enough attention in geology class, I posed the questions, "what is a glacier exactly, and if it is sitting on the sunny mountain side why hasn't it melted already?" Here's a bit of what Wikipedia has to say on the subject...

A glacier is a large, slow-moving river of ice, formed from compacted layers of snow, that slowly deforms and flows in response to gravity and high pressure. Glacier ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth, and second only to oceans as the largest reservoir of total water. Glaciers cover vast areas of polar regions but are restricted to the highest mountains in the tropics. There are two main types of glaciers: alpine glaciers, which are found in mountain terrains, and continental glaciers, which can cover larger areas. Thermal classifications of surface conditions vary, so glacier

zones are often used to identify melt conditions. The dry snow zone is a region where no melt occurs, even in the summer. The percolation zone is an area with some surface melt, and meltwater percolating into the snowpack, often this zone is marked by refrozen ice lenses, glands, and layers. The wet snow zone is the region where all of the snow deposited since the end of the previous summer has been raised to 0°C. The superimposed ice zone is a zone where meltwater refreezes as a cold layer in the glacier forming a continuous mass of ice.

Cindy wanted to go on this particular hike to see and take photos of wild flowers. I got to see my "first Columbine", the white and lavender State Flower of Colorado.

I was definitely tempted to go skinny dipping in the beautiful glacier lake until realizing the glacial runoff was the coldest water I have felt EVER!