[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

The Glaciers You Can Walk On Before They're Gone for Good

There are still glaciers you can walk on — crampons, blue ice, a guide on a rope. Here is what a glacier hike actually feels like, how to book one safely, and why the clock is running out.

The glaciers you can walk on don’t look real until you’re standing on one, and then they look almost too real, this groaning blue thing under your boots that you suddenly understand is alive and moving and, yeah, dying.

I want to be honest up front. I’m not a climber. I get winded on stairs. So when a guide handed me a pair of crampons and said “step like you mean it, heel first,” my main feeling was that I’d made a terrible mistake. Spoiler: I had not. It was one of the best mornings of my life. But my legs were jelly by lunch.

Cold, obviously. But weirdly bright, almost painful bright, the sun bouncing off white and blue from every direction. The ice isn’t smooth like a rink. It’s cracked and ridged and dirty in places, with these deep cracks called crevasses that go down further than you want to think about, and little streams of meltwater running through channels in the surface, the clearest water you’ve ever seen.

And the colour. People say “blue ice” and you nod, sure, blue. No. It’s a blue you don’t have a name for, this deep glowing aquarium blue down inside the cracks where the ice is old and dense and squeezed out all the air. I just stood and stared into one until my guide gently pulled the rope.

It also talks. The glacier creaks and pops and sometimes makes this distant boom that everyone pretends didn’t startle them. That’s the ice moving. You’re walking on something in slow-motion motion.

This is the part where I get serious for a second, because glaciers kill people who treat them like a theme park.

Go with a licensed guide. Always. Non-negotiable. Crevasses get hidden under a thin lid of fresh snow that looks exactly like the solid stuff next to it, and a guide knows the route, reads the ice, ropes you up, and carries the gear to haul you out if everything goes wrong. The “I’ll just walk out a little way myself” people are the ones the rescue teams talk about.

Reputable operators include the basics, crampons, a harness, an ice axe, a helmet, and they’ll teach you the few moves you need in ten minutes at the edge before you go on. You do not need experience. You need decent boots, a willingness to listen, and a basic level of fitness, walking on crampons is a real leg workout.

What to bring:

• Layers, plural. It’s freezing on the ice and roasting in the sun, sometimes in the same hour.
• Real sunglasses and serious sunscreen. The glare off ice burns the underside of your nose, I am not joking, ask me how I know.
• Gloves, a hat, and waterproof everything. You will sit on wet ice at some point.
• Water and snacks. The cold and effort eat your energy faster than you’d think.

Because they’re going. That’s not a marketing line to sell you a tour, it’s just true. A lot of accessible glaciers have pulled back hundreds of metres in a few decades, and guides will point to a rock and say “the ice reached here when I started this job,” and the rock is way, way below where you’re standing now. Some walks that existed ten years ago don’t exist anymore because the ice retreated past the safe access point.

My guide, a woman who’d been leading these hikes for over twenty years, said the thing that stuck with me. She said she’s basically giving tours of a patient. She wasn’t being dramatic. She just looked tired when she said it.

So go. Soon. Not in a panicked way, in a “this is genuinely a now thing” way. Walk on the blue ice, listen to it groan, stare into a crevasse until someone tugs your rope, and carry it with you. It’s one of the few sights that makes the abstract climate news feel like a real thing happening to a real, gorgeous, doomed place under your feet.

Go this year if you can swing it — the glacier you skip in 2026 might not be walkable by the time you get around to it.

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