This is the first 9.5 minutes of the flight in to the Black Rapids Glacier. Kind of boring and bumpy, but some people might like it. I think video does a better job at representing the scale of this place than photos do.
Some interesting points:
At 2:20 in we start flying over some of the old moraines from previous surges. It’s like looking at a record of past extents of the glacier.
3:15 we start flying over parts of the Black Rapids Creek, or river. This is all melt and run-off coming from the glacier valley.
approx. 4 minutes in start flying over the terminus of the glacier. Really nasty terrain in areas. There was so much water this year it almost looks like a lake-terminating glacier.
6:40 fly past a recently collapsed ice tunnel. It fell sometime after we first flew in. It’s possible we heard it happen from high up on the glacier too.
approx. 7:30 start to really see the first of a series of landslide debris from the 2002 magnitude 7.9 earthquake. These are absolutely enormous sections covering the glacier.
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9:10 fly over a small section of ice between the debris of the two collapsed mountain sides.
Also, below is a shorter clip from the flight out. We sat to wait for weather to clear, in hopes that we could reach points higher up. The weather did not cooperate and the temperature dropped fast. After turning to the east we fly past the moraine we camped on for two weeks this summer. The video ends as we begin flying over another one of the rock-slides from the 2002 earthquake.
