Even as we started out, making our way through a stretch of virgin forest, the Hailuogou Glacier still seemed to me like an unattainable dream. Tall green trees, towering skyward, lined the mountain path. Anywhere and everywhere, there was sweet spring water...gushing out from underground, forming crystal-clear streams, or pouring down rocks as a delicate water Curtain.

On a crag was built a small log cabin that served as the viewpoint station, and an excellent vantage point it was, facing the snow-capped peak opposite and with the l0,000-year-old glacier below. I was lost for words to describe my emotions at setting foot on the glacier for the very first time-they were nothing like what I'd anticipated. The ice waterfall looked slightly blue in the sunlight. Glacial arches, in many shapes and attitudes, and ice mushrooms too, created a veritable wonderland of ice; the surface of the glacier itself felt more like a thick swathe of rock debris, covering the ground densely and deeply, making you sometimes feel that what lay beneath your feet was no different from the other mountain terrain you'd previously crossed.

Hailuogou boasts a great many glaciers, three of which are much larger than the rest. The biggest, some 14 kilometers long, is Glacier N0.1 or, as it is commonly called, the Great Ice Waterfall. Having gone up the glacier for three kilometers and then round the forest of black pine, we could see the ice in the distance: it was 1,100 meters wide with a drop of 1,080 meters, like the Milky Way pouring down from the sky£®Without seeing it for yourself, you could never find words adequate to describe its uniqueness and magnificence.

It is said that in spring and summer when glacial movement is most active, you can hear ice breaking away from the glaciers several hundred times a day. The biggest avalanche involved some one million cubic meters of ice. When a glacial avalanche happens, blue lights glimmer, the ground shakes£¬and hundreds of thousands of ice blocks running down, colliding, filling the valley with a fog of snow.

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