For the second time on this trip I had to sprint, bags in hand, to make a connection. Only this time it was for the last bus of the day to the Moreno Glacier. It was leaving at three, and the superbly reliable staff at my hostel, the same people who informed us that they were open for all hours of the night, neglected to tell us that although we could buy a ticket for the bus at the desk and that the bus leaves at three and we can be picked up at the hostel, the CONNECTION to the bus terminal left at 2:30. Hans and I with no more than one minute to spare ran all the way through town and up the hill to dive onto the bus Hollywood style just as it was about to pull away from the station.

I collapsed, sweaty and exhausted into my seat, pulled out my iPod, and tried to nap as we got moving and the Patagonian steppe rolled out before us.

It’s a two-hour trip to the glacier, and just shy of the park as I leaned over to talk to Hans, someone shouted my name from the front of the bus. I guess my incessant blabbering carried all the way to the front where Amy and Paddy (from Bolson) were sitting. As any backpacker can tell you, it really is a very, very small world.

So what can I say about the Moreno Glacier that I haven’t already? It’s a massive chunk of ice nearly two-hundred-feet tall. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and it catches the evening light and turns it to bright blue. And despite all the amazing and beautiful sights I have seen in the world, this probably captivated me the most. It dawned on me later why. It’s not that the glacier is more beautiful than a canyon or a sunset or a mountaintop. It’s just that it was the only natural wonder I have ever seen that actually DOES something. It’s moving. And because of that the ice is constantly popping and cracking and crashing. We watched rapt as explosions like bomb blasts roared from within its endless canyons and crevasses and waited anxiously for more blocks of it to go roaring into the lake below. From a distance, the blocks dropping into the water don’t seem that large. Then you scale them with the boat motoring out to cart bug-eyed tourists to see the glacier and see that the blocks were significantly larger than the ferry. We saw three blocks literally the size of apartment buildings peel off to crash spectacularly into the lake. We saw chunks the size of tractor trailers break right in front of us, and watched as an entire tower of ice dropped into a crevasse with a noise that can only be described as terrifying. Where the glacier came to rest (if you can call that “resting”) on the shore there was a tunnel that formed between the ice and the lake, and frozen boulders would regularly collapse off of it. Now that’s what I call extreme kayaking. Faster, dammit! Faster! Someone alert ESPN.

We spent three hours at the glacier, totally captivated by what amounts to nothing but a really big ice cube. But every time we turned around to leave the glacier would creak or groan or pop, and we would bolt back to the railing to see what it was going to do next. The Moreno Glacier was a visible and audible example of both the destructive and creative forces of nature, and those forces when viewed first hand are awesome indeed.