Image 1: Most glaciers calve icebergs into a body of water. For me, exploring the wild is always a great adventure, but I never imagined what lay in store for us when my father, Allan, and I arrived at Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. We approached the vicinity of the glacier at around 7 p.m. during the summertime, when the days don't get dark until about 10. As we drove the highway that ran along the narrow glacier, I was immediately struck by the oddness of this glacier. As you may know, glaciers are "rivers" of ice that normally terminate into a body of water, where they calve huge ice blocks that crash into water and become icebergs (image 1). Matanuska was entirely different. Not only did it exist outside of the typical snowy context, but it ended in an a woodsy valley floor. It also appeared much too long, narrow and delicate to keep from melting away. Right from the start, it was mysterious. We stopped on the side of the highway to take a photo of what would prove to be an unbelievable illusion (image 2). The glacier wasn't at all the way it seemed. Image 2: From a great distance, the glacier appeared thin. We finally reached the turnoff for the glacier. Before the descent to the valley floor, there was a vista point overlooking the valley (image 3). We could now see enough detail to make a few interesting observations. We noticed that there were dozens and dozens of mounds of dark gravel, like dunes, along the edges of the glacier (image 4). I'll return to the subject of the mounds later on. We also observed what appeared to be spires of ice protruding from the glacier. I pointed to the tip of the glacier asked my dad how tall he thought those peaks rose. He said, "I don't know, about 10 feet I suppose." That sounded about right to me. We had no idea at that point how far we actually were from the glacier and that our sense of scale was completely inaccurate. Image 3: Notice the spires of ice on the right end. We followed a winding road through the woods that ended at a small parking lot on a hill near the glacier. We saw a few people coming back from the dunes so we knew that we had to walk in that direction. We hadn't been given a map because the glacier site is not an official park, just a point of interest. Actually, you pay a private party to pass through their land to get there and that's the extent of it. They show you a hand-drawn map at the booth where you pay to pass their gate, but they don't give you one because that would make them liable for your safety. When we got to the "mounds," we saw somewhat of an unmarked path through the gravel. The path was very uneven. In fact, after only a minute, the path disappeared and we ventured on our own. This appeared to be the extent to which most people explored. We saw that the mounds were huge, at some points blocking our entire view of the glacier. We worked our way through the low points, trying to avoid the many streams meandering around the glacier. Image 4: The glacier burrows beneath the ground creating large mounds of dirt and rock.