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The Glaciers are Melting

With the rapid advance of global warming, glaciers are melting all through the high Rocky Mountains.

Glacier National Park and the the Wind Rivers of Wyoming are two places I have most noticed
the loss of glaciers over the last several years.

I first started hiking and backpacking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming some thirty years ago.  As I mentioned in my last article, the two real changes I have seen in the Winds over the years have been that the pines are beginning to die on a large scale and that the glaciers are melting.

I remember one Wind River trip in particular that really brought this home to me.  In about 1985 I went on a 12 day backpacking trip into the northern Wind Rivers with my wife's nephew Lon.  In those days everyone doing any serious hiking in the Winds always carried an ice axe; it was just something you needed on a regular basis.

In the first couple of days of this trip I remember using my axe to cross a long, steep snowfield that the trail cut across; it was something I needed to do in case I slipped and needed to self arrest.  The next day we crossed a high, trail-less pass to get into Tibcomb Basin and I used my axe to glissade seven or eight hundred feet off the pass and down into the basin.  The following day we hiked up toward Dinwoody Peak, the highest peak in Wyoming, and spent all of one afternoon climbing a long, steep snowfield where we kicked steps and used our ice axes continually.  Then,  later in the trip, while hiking  on a major trail we topped a rise to see that the trail on the lee side of the rise had disappeared under a huge, very steep, very icey snowfield.  In order to get down at all, ice axes were an absolute essential.  And all this wasn't in the early spring, it was in the middle of September when most of the snow had melted.

Seven years ago I made the almost identical trip in the Winds with one of my sons and his wife.  We were planning to climb some of the higher peaks so we took ice axes.  We never used them the entire trip even on the highest peaks or passes.  There wasn't even a hint on snow on any of the trails we used.  The difference in Titcomb basin was particularly striking.  None of the miles-long snowfields we had spent so much time climbing and descending with ice axes on the previous trip even existed anymore.  They had all turned into large completely dry, snow-free scree fields.  (Scree fields are areas of rocks and boulders that have fallen from surrounding peaks.)  The Wind Rivers had turned from a land of ice and snow and rock into a land of rock and bare earth.

Even though we were climbing on large extensive snowfields on the first trip,  not on any real glaciers, the glaciers are also disappearing in the Wind Rivers and all over the Rocky Mountains.  This was very apparent on my long summer shoot this year.  It was particularly apparent in Glacier National Park.  In 1850 there were 150 named Glaciers in the Park.  Now there are 26.  Back in the 1990's  the USGS was predicting that Glacier National Park would have no glaciers left at all by 2030,  now they are predicting that this will happen by 2020.  In 1850 there were 21.6 square kilometers of Glaciers in the Park, by 1974 this had shrunk to 7.4 square kilometers and today there are only tiny scraps of glaciers left.

I can remember hiking the wonderful trail to Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park when I was a little kid of 10 or 12.   I remember thinking that the glacier was huge, that it covered the whole side of the mountain.  Undoubtable this was partially the result of my memory magnifying something I had seen as a kid.  But still, when I repeated the hike this summer, the glacier seemed to be a shred of the gigantic expanse of snow and ice that was there on my childhood hike.  And in fact, Grinnell Glacier has, by official measurement, shrunk by ninety percent over the past century.

Here is a very interesting article by the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center about the disappearance of Glaciers in Glacier National Park with tons of statistics if you are interested.

The Wind River Mountains, Teton National Park, Glacier National Park, and Rocky Mountain National Park are all going to be glacier-less in the next ten or twenty years.  Without glaciers they will be very different places ecologically and scenically.  The old world of glacial clad peaks is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.  It all makes me pretty sad.

Bill Atkinson was one of the first people to bring Global Warming to public attention in 1989 with his book, "The End of Nature."  This book isn't really an ecology book, it is more of a philosophical discussion of what global warming means for human beings.  The basic concept of the book is that the idea of nature has ended.  For thousands of years human beings have thought of nature as something beyond man, something that would always endure no matter how badly man screwed things up; nature was something beautiful and eternal that was separate from man and which would last forever and never change.  Atkinson says that with global warming, this is no longer true.  Now man is actually changing nature in his relentless consumption of the bounties of the earth.

The End of Nature is only one of Atkinson's many, many books and articles that are very much worth reading.  I highly recommend him.