Ice

Big, Big, Big, Big

That's what Briksdal Glacier looked like as we got closer and closer. And that was just along the road that lead to a parking lot well below it's toe. A twenty kilometers valley drive has brought us here, to the boundary of Jostedalsbreen National Park. It took us past sky-scraping hills and blue-green lakes brimming with the reflections of the snow capped slopes that feed them. At the park boundary, the road ended. On our map the dashes of foot paths took over. We dug out our boots and started up.

The trail was beautiful. Bridges spanned water falls and horse-drawn passenger carts paraded in caravans along the lower gravel road. Once we reached the morain, our earlier assesment of big, looked small. Blue glacial ice, stories high, climbed from the ground. It spilled back over itself into endless white crevasses that trailed up the mountain. They disappeared into thin ribbons of snow. At our feet melt waters trickled, and in the rock fields along the edge of the ice we could look into large dripping holes to underground glacial streams. High on the glaciers tongue we watched avalanches cascade and ice-climbers make their way across the icy arm.

Briksdal glacier sits in the Oldedalen (Olden valley) at the end of one of the three branches of the Nordfjord. It is a tongue of the Jostedalsbre, the largest surviving ice field on the mainland of Europe. The Jostedalsbre ice plateau extends over an area of about 486 square kilometers and a height of between 1500 and 2000 meters. The Briskdal glacier itself is one of the fastest advancing glaciers since the "Little Ice Age" nearly 300 years ago. Between 1992 and 1995 it advanced 220 meters. It's hard to believe that little more than a century ago farmers brought their cattle over the icefield and down this glacier from east Norway.