The depths of winter, in September.  A major highlight of the Alaska trip was a flightseeing tour by helicopter over glaciers east of Anchorage.  Most of these pictures were taken from the helicopter.

Two major ice flows come together.  I had seen glaciers before, but not this many, not this massive and not this widespread.  Most intriguing to me were the dark stripes appearing between the merging flows, called moraine.

Moraine is the dirt, stones and boulders dug up and pushed aside by glaciers tearing through the ground.  When two glaciers flow together, as above, the moraine becomes trapped between them, forming these stripes.

The stripes of moraine and the lanes of glacier form a road right down to the sea.  Just as much of an iceberg is under the water, much of a glacier is under the ground you see alongside it.  I was told this glacier flow is hundreds of feet deep.

We landed a couple of times during the flight, once on the glacier itself.  The pilot invited me to drink straight from a glacier puddle, and it was some of the best water I’ve ever tasted.  Anchorage’s water supply comes from glaciers.  And yes, the icy water really is blue.

Our second landing was on a hill covered with bearberries alongside the glacier, allowing me this nice photograph of a glacier spilling down a mountainside in the distance.  Many such mountains with glaciers surrounded this spot.

Back up in the helicopter now, an other-worldly shot of a broken side of a glacier.  The break reveals a wall of ancient blue ice within, perhaps the height of a ten-story building.

All these glaciers are part of a single flow that stretches for many dozens of miles.  The following day, after traveling an hour by train southeast out of Anchorage, I saw another series of glaciers that were part of this same flow.