Each day, a glacier appears slightly different, altered by wind, snow, sun, and the natural slow process of sliding down the mountainside. According to Fountain, Hood's glaciers will move, at the most, 30 feet a year. This is what some climbers jokingly refer to as a "congressional pace."

We continue across to a crevasse, a razor-blade gash created by the glacier's persistent downward motion. Because snowfields don't move, they don't have crevasses, which, potentially, can extend all the way to the bedrock below. These deep crevices are a climber's nightmare, especially when they're hidden underneath a layer of fresh snow. Mountaineering training involves a lot of crevasse rescue.

Bates unhooks himself from the line and creeps up to the lip. He pounds in an anchor and descends down about 20 feet to the bottom. The snow-covered floor feels solid, and I'm allowed to check it out.

The first thing you notice when you're inside a crevasse is how blue the ice is; it's a hue you've never seen before. This particular crevasse is small, perhaps six feet across, with walls of striated layers that have formed over hundreds of years, each stratum depicting a season.

On the summit side, the wall is amazingly smooth, beveled and polished by nature's freakish force. The opposite side, though, is rough and crumbling with snow, as a result of less sunlight each day. The floor descends down into who knows what. In two hours, once this crevasse has been softened by the sun, it will be much too dangerous to explore.

Bates shows me how to climb back up the wall using my crampons and axes, and we continue down the glacier's slope.

The next crevasse we come to is much larger - it's actually two gashes, with a snow bridge in the center. Bates goes ahead with a rope, turns a screw into the ice wall, and anchors a safety line across the bridge and down to the bottom.