The Glacier Guide – Part 1: Blue Ice

"Step like this," said Sigrun. "Flat. Kick in. Trust the spikes."

"I do trust the spikes."

"Then why are you walking like you're on eggs?"

Hanna laughed, and the sound echoed off the ice walls. They stood at the mouth of a long glacier in southern Iceland on a bright cold morning, a river of white and blue that wound down between black mountains. Hanna, thirty-five, a geologist from Bergen, had signed up for a tour out of professional curiosity and personal exhaustion. Sigrun, thirty-eight, the guide, had a weathered face, a thick blonde braid and the calm manner of someone who had spent fifteen winters on the ice.

She checked each strap on Hanna's crampons herself, kneeling on the snow, tugging, nodding. "Good. Come."

The group moved slowly up the glacier in a line, but at the third stop Sigrun pulled Hanna aside. "You study ice," she said. "I would like to show you something. If you want."

"Is it safe?"

"I have gone there four hundred times."

A narrow crack opened in the glacier wall, and they slid through it, one after the other, into a tunnel of pure sapphire. The light came down through metres of ice in shifting shades of blue, and the walls glittered like the inside of a jewel. Hanna stood stock still, her breath fogging, and whispered something in Norwegian.

"I know," said Sigrun, quietly. "Every time, I forget how it looks. Then I come in, and I remember."

They stood together in the blue light. Their shoulders touched.

"Sigrun."

"Yes?"

"I think I'm going to extend my trip."

Sigrun turned. Her eyes, in the blue, were very light. "I would like that," she said. "Can I tell you something else?"

Continue the story: Part 2 – Warm Cabin.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Warm Cabin.