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

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

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 onto the glacier.

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

Eddy Cartaya discovered the Snow Dragon and remembers thinking how a minor injury could leave him dead of hypothermia.

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

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