August 2014
Wrangell - Saint Elias National Park, AK, USA
Canon 5D MkII & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM, 1/90s f/8 ISO400 @24mm
Iceberg Lake (shown above) is a joukaloup (glacially dammed lake) created when the meltwaters raging down the valley (from behind in the photo) are blocked by the glacier shown in the image, which is just one of the many tributaries of the enormous Tana Glacier, which in turn is just one of the many outlets (and quite small, compared with others) of the otherworldly Bagley Icefield, which at nineteen hundred squares miles in size if the biggest chunk of ice on Earth outside of the poles and Greenland.
Every year during the spring melting season, the glacier acts as a dam and starts backing up the waters, filling up the lake in the process. Blocks of ice continuously calving off from the glacier form icebergs that float on the lake, hence its name. As the water raises pressure starts to build up and at some point in early summer the dam gives way, the lake drains, and the icebergs get stranded on the muddy lake bottom, slowly melting away. In 2014 that apparently had happened long before my arrival, since there was no trace of icebergs on the valley bottom, which was basically a wasteland of sand and silt that took a lot effort to walk through. The lake is three miles long on the map, but I took the photo from a hundred foot high hill no more than half a mile from the glacier, which means that I walked approximately two and a half miles sinking my feet in the same mud that a couple months earlier had been under icy water.
To tell the truth, I do not know exactly the distance, but it took forever, continuously pulling one foot out of the mud while sinking the other one as far as possible in front of it. Being an engineer, I tried to remain focused and alleviate the misery trying to mentally solve the following math problem. Let's say that you (me) weigh around a hundred and ninety pounds, are wearing a couple of size 14 heaving duty leather boots, and continuously sink between four and six inches (some steps a little more, some others a little less) while walking through the mud. Then you (me) come across a trail of grizzly bear paw prints on the mud. Fortunately the mud around the prints is dry so you (me) guess that it is at least a couple days old and there is no need to worry too much. Although your (my) size fourteen footprints are huge, these ones look like made by a giant with distorted feet, since they are least fifty percent longer and approximately twice as wide as yours (mine). Given that the bear has four legs to your (my) two and that the bear prints are deeper (not by much, maybe two inches, but still noticeable) than yours (mine), estimate the bear's weight. You have two minutes. Hint: the ratio between your (my) weight and the product of the combined surface of both your (my) feet multiplied by your (my) prints depth, should be equal to the bear's weight (a.k.a. x) divided by the product of the combined surface of all four bear paws multiplied by their depth. There you have your rule of thirds. Work it out.
The result was to double check the size of the prints, then their depth, then to hurry up. None of the many bears I had seen during the previous five days of backpacking along Iceberg Lake Valley looked even close to the fifteen hundred pounds I got. I knew that males on Kodiak Island four hundred miles to the west routinely reach that size and even a few hundred pounds more, but here they were supposed to be smaller, a thousand pounds tops. The only logical explanation was that the bear prints had been there for a much longer time. The non stop sun I had been lucky to enjoy for the past few days had been baking the mud, hardening it up, and diminishing the depth of my footprints. By how much I did not know. So just in case, better continue keeping my eyes wide open.