This image is arguably one of the more challenging to capture places in my current bank of images. Getting to this spot by foot requires a lot of walking, and a lot of luck in weather conditions. 22.5 km of walking from the car to camp, then about 10.5 km of walking from camp to this spot, with ~1000m of elevation gain (one way), and having to shoot the scene in mid-day. Of course, to leave you have to do all that in reverse. All together, capturing this image – the key spot I was interested in on this hike – took 3 days of what felt like non-stop work. Add to that a near tragedy involving quicksand on the hike out, and this single image was probably one of the most labour intensive images I’ve captured. My feet were very displeased with the situation, but in the end it was worth it.
One of the things I love about this spot is the incredibly deceptive scale. A lot of people look at this image and think the glacier is just a big roadway travelling between the mountains, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. This glacier is absolutely MASSIVE. From left to right in this image, the glacier is around 3.5km wide. From where I am standing to the mountain in the centre of the frame is somewhere around 17km away from where I took this image. Everything seems to be bigger in the Yukon!