Ice Climbing, Nugget Falls, Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, Alaska – Image 2751

It was a beautiful sunny day, and I headed out to the Mendenhall Glacier and Lake to see what I could see. Since it was mid-week, the place was empty. On a sunny weekend there would have been hundreds of folks enjoying the ice, snow and views. I saw two people ice climbing the Nugget Falls. I went over to check them out and low and behold I knew them. It was Jill (on the ice fall) and her dad, Dave (not in photo). The father/daughter team have been climbing together as long as she was first able to get on rock faces. It was no surprise I would find them here. I wanted to get the photo showing the ice fall backgrounded by the Mendenhall Glacier. It meant I had to climb up on the edge and shoot across the ice. After some careful moving around the edges of the ice fall on some very slippery rock, I was able to get the image I had pre-visualized. I shot a lot of images and it took me a long time to find this one. It was the last one on the end of the roll of film and really the only one that worked. All the rest of images had Jill looking up to see where she was climbing and made sense from a climbing perspective but not visually. Her constant view to the upper frame of the image kept pulling the viewer out of the image. It was not until the one final frame of her looking back at the glacier did this photo work. I missed this moment on my first several looks at these images. It took me several years of going back to the shoot to finally realize I had the one image that worked. This photo illustrates the month of March in my 2012 Juneau Calendar. Enjoy the photo and thanks for visiting. Camera body: Nikon D5, Lens: Nikkor 35-70mm , 35mm velvia slide film, polarized© Mark Kelley