Today my classroom was…

A mountain but it is not just any mountain it is a mountain full of ice and those are so special that they have their own name! It's called a… glacier!!! Now first I need to tell you what a glacier is. It's a very big hunk of ice on a mountain. That is the easy part, the hard part is that the glacier is living! I am going enough to tell you how so let me get started. How did the glacier become ice? Well it was snow then there was so much snow that it all got mushed together and it turned into ice. The place where it collects and mushes up is called the neve and is like the big stringy part of a tennis racket. I bet that if you get a snowball and press it really hard that maybe it will get hard or if you are lucky turn into ice but it does not always happen. So now we a have a lot of ice. Then there is so much ice that the ice starts to fall because of gravity and melting and it piles starts down the mountain. (Sorry I forgot to tell you that this is happening on a mountain). Where it slides down the mountain is like the handle of the tennis racquet.

Now I am going to tell you what I did on the glacier and how I got there. So, I went on a helicopter and the helicopter took me to the glacier. I landed on where it would be like the top of the handle of the tennis racquet right before it turns into the stringy big part. When the whole group that was coming with us was there the guide that was leading us showed our group how to put on crampons on. Now crampons are things that go on the bottom of your shoes and they have spikes so you can stick into the ice and not fall. Once everybody got their crampons on we set off for the journey. In the journey we… Went through 2 really, really awesome ice tunnels that were 100% ICE!! And we hiked a lot. It was a hot day and some ice fell, it sounded exactly like this….RUMBLE. BOOM. Where the ice switched from the neve to the handle it looked like icicles but instead of hanging down standing up. We were having so much fun that the next thing you now we had to go back. On the way back the guide told us something very important this is what he said, "just be careful there is more of a chance that you will get hurt on the way down then up!" Carefully we went back down then got back on the helicopter and the helicopter took us back.

But that is NOT all I did… I also went on a hike at the bottom of the mountain in the rain forest inside a cave! But we had to do a loooong hike to get there, looong hike! All up hill. The cave was like a tunnel made under the ground through the mountain. When you go in it you are almost surrounded by dirt! In the cave tunnel there was a little creek like thing in the bottom of it. People built the cave tunnel a long time ago so water can travel down a mountain. They want it at the bottom of the mountain so the people at the bottom (were the village is) can get electricity.

The water is freezing cold in the cave tunnel. Its so cold that at first your feet hurt then they get really numb. The good thing is the water only goes up to about your ankles. In the tunnel there are glowworms that are like 1 centimeter long and at the very end they have a green dot on them and that glows up. But there are also things that at first look like aliens then if you really look they look like shrimp but big shrimp! My Mom told me later she saw on the Discovery channel it was a may fly and the glow worms trap and eat them so he was probably hiding from them.