Week 3 - St. Mary’s Glacier

Sunday, September 1st, 2013 My wife and I made our way up to St. Mary’s Glacier which is just outside of Idaho Springs. The below picture is one we took while we were there. In the picture you can see what looks like a white stone on the upper left. That in fact is the glacier which is there year round. If you travel up starting in the spring and ending in the fall for each week you can see how the glacier moves. The principle of moving glaciers first surprised me but understanding why and how they move makes more sense to me now. Glaciers move to fill in the spots that have been melted. Glaciers move quicker in the upper center and slower at the edges and bottom. A time lapse will reveal that the glacier is like a very viscous liquid as it only moves millimeters each day. The beauty at St. Mary’s glacier begins in the hill sides, they are very rough, the razor like carvings in the stone is from the moving glacier. The beauty then ends with the pure, cold and clear lake. The glacier slices segments of rock and other particles out of the ground as it moves. The glacier stays year around because of the angle of the mountain to the south that sits over the glacier and shades it which helps prevent total melting. This means that the necessary equation of it receiving more snow in the winter than melts in the summer is true. The glacier is there year-round and due to this you will often see skiers and snowboarders hiking up the hill side and then riding down. The lake there is fed from the melt glacier water, the time that we were up there I was able to catch in this picture the moving water that feeds the lake. The water in the lake is very fresh and clear but is extremely cold; swimming on any day outside of the warmest is really ill-advised.