Our Glacier Dragon series is a tribute to the Snow Dragon ice cave discovered inside the Sandy Glacier on Mount Hood, in Oregon.

The modeling images below represent the entrance and interior of the dragon’s lair.

Ice cave systems are temporary by nature and result from the melting of a glacier’s interior.

Mount Hood’s Sandy Glacier is home to the largest and most extensive glacier cave system in the contiguous United States.

Sandy is hundreds of years old with bands of ice that mark each year of snowfall piled on top of the glacier then compressed into blue ice over time.

Large ice caves form when a glacier thins and the weight of the ice no longer squeezes the caverns shut.

Eddy Cartaya, the discoverer of the Snow Dragon, remembers thinking how a minor injury in the cave
could leave him dead of hypothermia.

On one trip he slept inside the Snow Dragon to take shelter from a fierce storm.

“We had no communications for help and we were inside a place nobody even knew existed.”