A matter of scale
The Chilean Fjords are certainly high on a scale of grandeur. We spent our morning cruising through breathtaking glacially-carved topography. The fjord was once a valley filled with ice. Now, the ice is gone and the valley has been flooded by the sea. Steep walls rise to peaks above. U-shaped hanging valleys show where smaller tributary glaciers once entered the main valley glacier. The mountain slopes are dusted with the first snow of the Austral autumn. But is all the ice gone? No. Glaciers still push out the vast Patagonian Ice Sheet, some of them reaching the sea, others ending as hanging glaciers farther up a valley. We turned up a side fjord to reach Seno Iceberg: Iceberg glacier. There we boarded our Zodiacs and kayaks. The deep blue ice of the glacier made it seem that color was radiating from within the glacier itself. Grandeur? Without question.
Then we landed near the glacier and found nature on another scale: a tiny purple flower on a delicate stalk, so small that it had to be viewed on hands and knees through a magnifying lens. I don't even know your name. I feel that we haven't been properly introduced. But your beauty is as much a part of our voyage through the Chilean Fjords as the sweeping vistas and the power of glacial ice. Nature seen and enjoyed at the scale of the landscape and of the microcosm.
