‘Another World’: Photographer Explores Giant Ice Caves in the Belly of a Glacier—And The Photos Are Surreal

Chandresh Kedhambadi’s shot of an ice climber scaling the interior of a glacier cave won runner-up placing in the Outdoor Adventure category for Canadian Geographic’s 2023 Photos of the Year competition. Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

By the time Chandresh Kedhambadi stepped into the ballroom-sized cavern, he could tell the glacier had been holding its breath for centuries.

In late 2020, Kedhambadi—at that point a Calgary-based chemical engineer with just four years of photography experience—guided his camera deep into the Athabasca Glacier, a colossal tongue of ice spilling down from the Canadian Rockies in western Alberta. Gazing at the translucent surfaces, he found a landscape frozen in time.

“When you look into the ice, the ice bubbles, the ancient air that’s trapped, you know you’re looking at a lot of history,” Kedhambadi, 50, told The Epoch Times. “The very first time I saw a glacier cave, it was like being transported into another world.”

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Kedhambadi’s ice cave photography includes “Yatra,” Sanskrit for “a journey,” capturing a huge glacier cave from the inside, as a fellow ice climber scales the frozen walls. The photo won runner-up placing in the Outdoor Adventure category for Canadian Geographic’s 2023 Photos of the Year competition. Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Kedhambadi noted a temporal paradox inherent in glaciers: they are ancient, but the caves within them are fleeting, melting in the glacial equivalent to the blink of an eye.

“From a composition perspective, it completely drew me because each one is so unique,” he said, adding that the rapid cycle of freeze and thaw offers new, unmapped subject matter for his camera each winter.

Glaciers “just hook you,” he said.

Kedhambadi was increasingly lured to study the volatile nature of the icefields, where his engineer’s eye helped him comprehend the shifting landscape.

“People think that these are just structures that sit there, but they’re not,” he said. “They’re dynamic, they’re moving. It’s almost like a river. But you can see the river flow, while you don’t see the ice flow.”

Capturing this ephemeral environment required him to push beyond accessible tourist pathways of the Athabasca into remote sites like the Columbia Icefield and Hector Glacier, where rigorous survival training was required; without cellphone reception, any failure to notice a hidden crevasse could be fatal.

“These are spots which are very remote,” Kedhambadi said. “When things go wrong, you better have the confidence and the training to pull yourself out of those situations.”

The photographer usually explores with four or five other experienced climbers, each towing backpacks loaded with roughly 50 pounds of gear. Their packs hold essential provisions—ropes, pulleys, extra gloves and jackets, and heated socks—along with his heavy cameras and tripods. Because these spaces are structurally safest when the temperature drops below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, expeditions require meticulous planning. A multi-hour trek into the back-country is a race against winter twilight, requiring their collective skills to swing into action in an emergency without relying on search and rescue.

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Kedhambadi delves deep into Alberta’s glacier country with four or five fellow ice climbers, who sometimes bring along elegant clothing in which to be photographed as subject matter. Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Kedhambadi’s skills were tested in March 2023 during an expedition to the Hector Glacier, a towering mountain system guarding the southern gateway to the Icefields Parkway corridor. To capture the scale of a frozen vault spanning the size of a football field, Kedhambadi introduced a human element, framing a fellow ice climber in a swirl of soaring ice walls, a visual tone poem of pitted reflections. Operating three cameras manually he captured “Yatra”—Sanskrit for “a journey”—which earned him runner-up placing in the Outdoor Adventure category for Canadian Geographic’s 2023 Photos of the Year competition.

But by autumn the landscape had changed completely. “We went back there in October or November, and that entire block of ice had just melted away,” he said.

From Sun to Ice

Kedhambadi’s photography journey began thousands of miles from the sub-zero ice caves of the Canadian Rockies. As a child, he spent summers wandering his grandparents’ coffee plantation in the Western Ghats, India, a lush mountain range that provided a stark contrast to his urban upbringing in Bangalore.

“Over there, national forests are truly wild,” he said.

Later, chasing a career in chemical engineering carried him across the globe to the oilfields of southern Alberta where, in 2009, he first witnessed the northern lights during a midnight drive. The auroras were a visual catalyst that forever changed his trajectory, leading him to co-found the Alberta Aurora Chasers, a community of night-sky photographers, before turning his gaze to the glaciers of nearby Banff National Park.

“The winter of COVID is when I first went out,” he said, speaking of his sojourn to the Athabasca Glacier.

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

Kedhambadi’s ongoing project, “Anitya Nila,” Sanskrit for “impermanent blue,” includes photographs taken at an undisclosed location in March 2026. Courtesy of Chandresh Kedhambadi

The scope of Kedhambadi’s expeditions soon expanded from independent cave explorations and aurora hunting to collaborations with NASA and a partnership with Sony to archive these water- and wind-sculpted curios of nature.

In March 2026, he ventured into his biggest cavern yet—an undisclosed venue for a project titled “Anitya Nila”—which featured prominently in the recently published coffee table book “The Canadian Rockies.”

Kedhambadi remained tight-lipped about the coordinates of what is considered one of Alberta’s largest ice caves. Glacier visitation has “kind of been crazy the last couple of years with social media,” he said, justifying his omission. But “Anitya Nila” now offers a window into a frozen world destined to vanish in a breath.