From the incredible hustle and bustle of the spreading city of Buenos Aires it was only three hours by plane. But in those three hours, the world changed.

We stepped down from the plane and we found ourselves on the wind swept, barren plains surrounding Rio Gallegos, Argentine. This is the region called Patagonia. Patagonia is comprised of perhaps the southern quarter of South America but is nearly uninhabited. The name Patagonia probably was given to the region by the crew of famed explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s ship as they encountered the Tehuelche Indians. In Spanish, Pata means paw, or foot. The Tehuelches were known for their huge moccasins!

Patagonia is a land of incredible contrasts. As the sea floor beneath the Pacific Ocean spreads eastward and is forced beneath the South American continent, it turns to molten lava under the increasing pressure and heat. It then erupts, often violently, in the volcanic range of mountains that we call the Andes. The Andes are an incredible range of mountains, with the crowned jewel, the peak Aconcagua, towering over 22,000 feet above sea level! It is the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas! As the prevailing westerly winds of Patagonia sweep in from the Pacific Ocean, they are laden with moisture. They strike the massive Andes and are forced upward, across the summits. As the air is forced upward, it cools. And in cooling, it can no longer holder it’s load of water. Rain comes pouring down, creating the incredible temperate rain forests on the western slopes of the Andes. And snow drifts to the earth high in the Andes creating some even more impressive glaciers. Then, to the east of the backbone of mountains, the dry air races across the flat expanse of barren land. The wind gusts at unbelievable speeds. And the dry air has no rain to drop upon this bleak landscape.

It is beautiful in it’s richness, it’s bleakness and the unimaginable contrasts.

The Hielo del Sur is the name given to the great Southern Patagonia Ice Field. It covers over 13,000 square kilometers (5200 square miles!) and is the second largest ice field in the world, surpassed only by the Antarctic Ice Shield. High in the Andes, the Hielo del Sur has collected snow over the millennia. The weight of the snow compacts the oldest and deepest layers into sapphire blue strata of ice. And the weight of the accumulating snow forces the ice field to spill over the edges of the valley in which it has formed, creating fingers of glaciers, rumbling down the mountainsides.

I was fortunate enough to visit the Moreno Glacier. It covers 257 square kilometers (a little over 100 square miles) is 400 feet deep and nearly 5 miles wide. But amazing and unimaginable as those numbers are, the most amazing to me was the fact that it moves forward nearly 7 feet a day!

As I stood watching, I quickly learned that this wasn’t just an incredible sight. It was also a symphony of incredible sounds! Ice, hundreds of thousands of years old, inexorably was pushed forward, creaking, groaning and complaining every inch of the way. And echoing off the mountainsides in the most eerie manner.

Then, as you sat immersed in the sounds and the sights, suddenly you would hear a massive cracking and crane your neck to watch a huge chunk of the glacier calve off into the lake! The sound of the splash would reach you several seconds after you watch it gracefully tumble. The waves would spread out as the chunk that just fell celebrates its liberation after the long journey. And it is minutes later before you see the last chunks cumbersomely bob back to the surface.

You know that you have just witnessed an absolutely amazing delight!

Several days later, hiking on the 45 mile long circuit around the Torres del Paine mountain massif, I joined a group hiking on Grays Glacier. The feeling of being on the tortured surface of the glacier, of stepping over crevasses that plunged to unknown depths, of listening to rivers flowing deep within the moving mass of ice was . . .was . . .oh, there just aren’t words!

I must admit that for me, glaciers are the most indescribable and exotic things I’ve experienced. They are like no other landscape you’ve ever seen, entertain you with sounds that you could never have imagined would occur. And they fill me with a spine tingling sense of awe that has me in goose bumps again, even as I sit writing.