Glaciar Perito Moreno

The Perito Moreno glacier is by far the coolest thing I have seen so far. It's massive. Unfathomably large. Truly too big to conceive of.

According to Wikipedia:

Surface area: 97 square miles
Length: 19 miles
Width: 3 miles
Height above water: 240 feet
Depth below water: 558 feet

People! That means the face of the glacier is 24 stories tall!

It was jagged, ranging in color from blinding white to cool blue in the cracks to a deep blue-green that -- I'm sorry -- was the exact color of a Gusher. There were also cinnamon streaks mixed in, where dirt had been pressed between layers of ice. Sometimes I'd try to look at it like a Jackson Pollack painting, first focusing on all the tan tips, then the darkest of the shadow blues, then the faintest blues. Everytime I looked at it I saw something new.

Every so often a huge chunk of ice would calve off and crash into the lake below, followed by a thunderous crack. The smaller pieces of ice made even louder cracks, like rifle fire. Oddly, there was about a one-second lag between when the ice hit the water and when you could hear the impact.

I have a weakness for taking pictures of gratuitous signage:

Caitlin and I spent a good five hours staring at the glacier. We went in the afternoon, when there are fewer people, and for a while we had an entire viewpoint balcony to ourselves. As we were sitting there, enjoying the silent beauty of the glacier and waiting for the next crash, I found myself wishing that I had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. I mean, how cool would it be to fire a grenade into the base of the glacier and watch a Dexter-Horton sized mass of ice blow off in slow motion, the creak turning into a wail as the chunk accelerated toward the lake in an enormous spray of water and ice? Made me think of that Onion article, ''Dinosaurs Sadly Extinct Before Invention of Bazooka.''