Ferrar Valley

Continuing further into the valley, we passed perched valleys often with a glacier hanging and crumbling off its cliff. Ice and rock embedded in a struggle for dominance; high rugged gray and brown masses that have been vaulted high above the valleys by tectonic forces from down deep versus its cold white and bluish counterpart. These mountains originated from a fiery world of molten rock and the energy that convects from our inner world; forging and thrusting these great spires of rock high into the air. Yet, with all their strength of endurance against the winds of time, they are yet still vulnerable to the unrelenting forces of the ice that continuously scraped and scorned the rocks by their weight and movement, with the inexorable desire of only getting down to the sea, where once achieving this goal, will perish like a moth to a flame. As we traveled deeper into this frozen valley, it was like an art galley of living earth and ice, in which we glided gently past these masterpieces of this harsh land. Then as we neared the end Ferrar Valley, we came upon a sight that completely overwhelmed the senses, for we had entered the wide expanse of the convergence of the Ferrar and Taylor Valleys.

Our hovering helicopter flew us into this wild expanse, and through the shock of the sheer openness of the land, pure as the expanse of a heavenly vista, we sailed high above these tongues of the ice sheet, with the high peaks to our west that held back an enormity of frozen water that has been locked up in these icy throes for hundreds of millennium. These rocky carved fortresses against the white plateau of ice have been victorious in years past. Yet, these ice masses pushed and have in the past overridden these mighty peaks and flowed down into these valleys. The remnants of these events are evident by carving of these proud mountains, now stripped down along their sides, exposing nearly flat layers of a now by gone era. Episodes of deposition from once flowing streams and rivers, of beaches where waves of warm soothing water washed over the shores of these now frozen lands are now locked in these rocks. For a person with knowledge of the Earth, they represent frozen time portals of long ago and are testaments of our ever-changing planet. Another layer tells yet another tale, in a later time, these rocks speak of a story when the deep interior of the Earth belched forth its inner molten self, extruding up through the Earth and then coming to rest above these pale brown sands of when early animals were still timidly coming forth onto land. These monstrous layers now form a banding of shades of brown to black from mountain to mountain seemingly ringing every peak in the this valley. As we floated around the back of this intersection of two majestic valleys, we entered Taylor Valley and started to come full circle in our trip.