The Yamato Mountain Range wraps the ice sheet around its shoulders like an old man with a shawl. Ice coming from high off the ice plateau of East Antarctica, arriving from as far away as a subice ridge 600 km to the south, finds this mountain range is the first barrier to its flow. The ice has piled its substance up against the mountains in a titanic contest that pits billions of tons of advancing ice against immovable rock, whose roots extend at least to a depth of 30 km. The ice is moving because billions of tons of ice are behind it, pushing it off the continent and into the sea. Ultimately it yields, diverging to flow around the mountains. On the upstream side the rocks have been almost completely overwhelmed – only pink granite peaks protrude above the ice, which spills down between and around them in tremendous frozen streams and eddies, lobes, and deeply crevassed icefalls. The change in elevation of some 1100 m between the high plateau upstream of the mountains and the lower ice flowing away from the downstream slopes creates a spectacular view of this giant downward step in the ice surface. Almost constant howling winds from the interior blow streamers of ice crystals off the mountain peaks and “snow snakes” dance down the slopes in sinuous trains, as if somehow connected to each other. The scale of the scene is such that people become mere specks in an awesome, frigid emptiness.