We don't know Colby Coombs, the climber you see here on Alaska's Matanuska Glacier, but we can tell you two things about him for sure: he's got nerves of steel and a kindly disposition. The nerves of steel-obvious. The disposition? Well, when Tom Bol asked him to climb up that path to nowhere, Colby was happy to oblige.

Tom was conducting an adventure sports photography workshop in August last year, and he led his participants into glacier territory to put theories and techniques into practice. Colby was the workshop's guide. He's a well-known climber, owner of the Alaska Mountaineering School and, incidentally, Tom's former climbing partner.

"We'd gone out on the ice and were looking at all these shapes and forms," Tom says, "and there's Colby, a world-class ice climber, and I said, ‘Colby, you gotta go out and climb on this thing, if only to give us a sense of perspective and scale.'

"The five students and I set up off to the side where there were kind of rolling hills of ice, not narrow or precarious like the trail he's on, which was maybe four feet across and rapidly narrowing as he approached that foot-wide constriction."

Tom made the photo about midday with a D3 and an AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G IF-ED lens. The exposure was 1/500 second at f/13 and ISO 200 with the camera set for aperture priority and Matrix metering.

No special metering for the ice? "Nope," Tom says. "These Nikon meters are so far beyond what we used to have. For this kind of scene in the past I'd be thinking, I gotta spot meter it and compensate for this and that, but here I just set Matrix and checked the LCD when the shot was made. The camera nailed it; this is the color of the ice because of its density and the way the light plays on it."

Tom says that what makes the image really come together are the dramatic breaks and lines in the ice and the approach of a storm. And Colby. "The storm started brewing behind the glacier, casting this eerie kind of light, and Colby just cruised on over there with two ice tools and starting climbing. And there you have it."

Indeed.

To see more of Tom's work, visit www.tombolphoto.com.