Like a breath of air sighing away beneath your feet, you touch down on the shimmering solidity of the glacier.  A helicopter seemed so daring, so adventurous and dangerous, but the experience was antithetical to your expectations, more the feeling a feather must have, caught in a gentle updraft and carried over a mountain to alight on the craggy ice.  A vast river of snow compacted again and again until all the air was gone and all that was left was this ethereal mass inching its way into the sea.

The sight that greats you as you step out onto stolid ground is surprising as well.  One might expect a glassy expanse of blues and whites, conveniently dusted with a powdery coating of fresh fallen snow for sure footing – but one might be taken aback by the reality if so.  You step down from your Pegasus with a gravely crunch, onto a surface more akin to a damp beach or those playgrounds of the 90s laid over with miniscule, polished rocks.  While generally flat in the immediate vicinity, the glacier is far from smooth, a craggy, clumpy mess of slushy icy crystals.  And it’s so dirty!  Everything is dusted not by fine particles of white, but by a pebbled coating of greyish brown silt that has been scrapped from the land as the frozen river flowed.

You’ve already zipped around the river below on a giggle-inducingly exhilarating air boat ride to see where Taku’s ice meets its final phase change.  You got to sit high up next to the giant fan by the captain; with the chill wind whipping at your face and the boat careening around wildly to avoid half sunken trees and fields of accumulated silt and gravel bars, you laughed until tears ran down your face.  You saw alpine waterfalls and enormous beavers and eagle’s nests in a green, early summer landscape on one side, and a rainbow of every blue that could possibly exist in the world on the other.  Solidly compacted ice with no air left within it absorbs every wavelength longer than those short blues, which fade to white when air is introduced and all the wavelengths and their corresponding colors are refracted.  Between this monochrome palate and the gray-brown silt, every sharp break as the ice crumbles from boulder to pebble is emphasized, leaving a dramatic image of icy decay.  It was like flying along the precise dividing line between the depths of cold, dead winter and the warmth and life of summer, as if Stormy reigned on one side and Rainbow Brite the other.*

Before your adventure ends and you reboard your sky chariot to return to its home in Juneau, you stop to fill your water bottle from the glacial river and sip an elixir that might have been solid for the past three thousand years.  Does it have a special, magical flavor, you wonder to yourself?  Probably not, you decide, but it is still incredibly cool (pun intended).  As you soar through the clouds, surmounting the snowy peak of the mountains and gliding down over the pristine, green slops, it occurs to you that you’ve just experienced something that few others will ever know.  You have walked on an ancient frozen river, seen it from all sides and drank of its freshly melted waters.  A deep sense of contentment washes over you then, and you know that this is a day that will live in your memory for all time.

*Side Note:  if you have no idea what I’m talking about with that reference, go watch the 1985 animated fantasy masterpiece that is Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer.  Stormy rules the sky of winter storms, and RB the sky of spring and rainbows.  The landscape of Spectra (the diamond planet through which all the light in the universe must pass) is also very reminiscent of a glacier.

This tour can be booked through one’s cruise line, but to save a boat load of money (ha!) you can book directly with NorthStar Helicopters here. They offer a wide range of other glacier-related adventures as well, from a simple walkabout to heli-skiing or ice climbing.