The Glacier Walk – Part 1: Roped Together

"You are stepping too carefully," said Bjorn.

"I'm on a glacier."

"Yes. The glacier does not mind."

Priya looked down at her crampons, biting into blue-white ice, and then at the vast frozen river that stretched ahead, ribbed with crevasses, shimmering in the thin sun. The wind was bitter. Her legs ached. The guide ahead of her, roped to her harness, moved with a light, steady rhythm as if the ice were a footpath.

She was thirty-one, a data analyst from Toronto, on a solo week in Iceland to recover from a bad year. He was thirty-five, a glacier guide, tall, lean and weathered, with a white-blond beard, pale blue eyes and a faded red jacket. The rest of the group trailed behind, chattering.

"Plant your foot flat," he said. "Trust the spikes."

She planted. It held.

"Good. Again."

For two hours, she followed him across the glacier, over ridges and past sapphire pools, through narrow blue canyons where the ice glowed from within. The silence was enormous. A distant crack, like a gunshot, rolled across the ice. She jumped.

"It is only moving," said Bjorn. "The glacier talks."

"It sounds angry."

"It is just old."

At a flat shelf above a deep crevasse, he stopped the group for lunch. He handed her a thermos of lava-hot soup, thick with potatoes and lamb. She drank, shivering. The steam rose in the freezing air.

"Look down," he said.

She peered over the edge. The crevasse dropped away in layers of blue, from turquoise to deep indigo to black, like looking into the throat of the earth. Her stomach swooped. But she did not step back.

"It is beautiful," she breathed.

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something?" said Priya.

"Yes."

"Do you ever get frightened?"

"Always," said Bjorn. "That is why I am careful. And why I love it."

"Green?" she said, a rope, a flag.

"Green," said Bjorn, with a startled smile. "Very green. We go on."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Blue Hour.