Exit Glacier at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska was one of the more moving sites in my 5-year photographic project on the national parks. My assistant Darin Steinberg and I spent one whole day walking a trail up toward the Harding Icefield where we spent hours watching the light and weather change, trying to take in the shear complexity of the view.

After that long climb up the Harding Icefield trail the day before, walking along the leading edge of the glacier seemed almost leisurely, but the weight of the camera and digital pack was still clearly there.

The towering ice glowed in the low morning light. It was hard to know where to point the camera, there was such an array of complex, intricate form, all made from the blend of white and blue ice, sprinkled with grayish brown earth, under a yet different blue sky.

Like so many of the landscapes I'm attracted to, glaciers seem other worldly, beyond human experience or easy understanding. As we venture out to other worlds, no doubt the strangeness will increase, our curiosity engaged yet further, and our struggles to make sense of what we see harder to resolve. We will first look for the familiar and probably call it beauty, then concentrate on the bizarre, eventually seeing its beauty. Finally, in the end, we will be as changed by the landscapes of these new worlds as our human needs can tolerate and our imaginations can reach.