But as they rose between the mountains and up to McKinley they became whiter than white, punctuated by aquamarine ice where shelves have collapsed and crevasses formed. For glacial ice, 100,000 years old, is blue. And here, below the surface of the Ruth glacier, it is several thousand meters thick.
After half an hour, we came in to land and it seemed we were heading straight for a mountain. But the Otter descended quickly, hit the snow and came to a smooth and fast halt. Visibility was seemingly endless and the silence truly moving. We climbed out and took in the view and it seemed inappropriate to break the peace with meaningless talk.
We had taken a bottle of vodka and mixed it with snow — just one to wet the baby's head. It was, after all, a celebration. But the glacial ice was too far beneath the snow and, even though there are millions of tonnes of it, we felt it would have been wrong to take even a bucketful.
Even with responsible winter gear, we began to freeze within minutes and it was time to go. Again, we rose steeply and in silence, awestruck.
The following day, the journey seemed to make the christening, and Bill's decision to bring up his children here, more poignant. It is a difficult place in which to live, but the air is clean, the inhabitants enjoy an unspoken collective togetherness and crime is almost non-existent.
And in a state with almost no major highways we must forgive them their use of aircraft and their carbon footprints. In every other respect, the people here fiercely guard their environment and constantly fight attempts to exploit its natural resources.
If you go, then, the principle of taking nothing but photographs and leaving nothing but footprints applies here as much as anywhere. And, anyway, your footprints will soon be covered in snow.
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