Shrinkage, for sure

Well, I didn't go quite this far.

Glacial Recession V

I'm starting to channel the Friday the 13th franchise with my serial glaciering, but this one's the last.

The final day we hiked a bit along the Highline Trail, looking at excellent examples of the U-shaped valleys carved by glaciation and generally just winding down from the day before. Jeff will likely offer the seminar again next summer, and I'll probably go again, as he plans to hike to other glaciers in the park next time.

The entire seminar was just great. I learned a great deal, not just about glaciation and the effects of climate change on the park, but about geology in general. Mr. T was a geologist before he became a bidnessman, but I had always glazed over during discussions of faults and synclines and formations, until I was standing in front of the real thing with someone explaining it to me. I can be a stickler for technicalities, particularly when dealing with terminology (imagine that!), and that was tripping me up a bit. Or rather, I tended to approach geological terminology with an overly literal mindset.

But really, I have to plug the Glacier Institute now. I mentioned to Jeff during class that I thought there was a good chance I'd become an Institute junkie. Just look at all the classes and seminars they offer. I could spend ten months just taking class after class, and I'd never get bored. The neat thing is that many classes allow kids as young as six to attend. So I think The Kid and I might take some seminars together in the coming years.

Finally, there are a slew of crevasse photos in my photostream here. (There are a few mountain goat shots in there, but the bulk of it is the Grinnell Glacier.) Perhaps you'll be able to get a sense from those images how unnerving it is to be hiking around them.

And sometimes, unnerving is good.

Glacial Recession, Part IV

A few months ago I wrote this post but never published it, as it just seemed entirely too navel-gazish:

I think it may be time for new boots. I've had these for almost nine years. I bought them at a small outdoor store in Greensboro, North Carolina just before my first backpacking trip, on the Long Trail in Vermont. I was in my last year of school, and I didn't have the money for them until two days before I left. There was no time for a breaking-in period, but the boots never left a single mark or blister.

These boots have squelched through the mid-summer mud in the Adirondacks. They've taken me on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia and Georgia, along Lake Superior and the rest of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, atop ridges in the Olympic range and to the edge of cold lakes at the base of Mt. Rainier. Last summer they helped me peel off a section of the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon.

These boots groaned under my pregnant weight while I was photographing prairie dogs and antelopes in the Badlands in South Dakota. They've hugged my feet while I hiked hesitantly around blind corners in Glacier National Park yelling "hey bear!"

They've been a part of most of the deeply gratifying moments I've had in the last ten years that didn't involve parenting -- and some that did. Not to be too maudlin, but giving them up feels too much like the end of an era I'm not ready to close out yet.

Maybe they'll make it another year.

Turns out they didn't.

We hiked about twenty miles over the three days of the seminar, or perhaps a hair less. The second day's hike to Grinnell Glacier constituted the bulk of the hiking, at 12 miles. It was hot, and I worked hard. The first day we hiked to the Hidden Lake Overlook off Logan Pass. On the way back, I felt a sort of odd flapping near my toes. The sole had separated from the boot. It was annoying, but I bought some rubber cement that night and applied it liberally to the detached sole. Then, for good measure, I wrapped the hell out of the boots with copious quantities of duct tape that Jeff had obtained from one of his innumerable park friends.

So we got up to the glacier on the second day, and I saw this standing between me and my glacial experience:


(This person, as you have no doubt astutely surmised, is not me.)

Welp, there was no way I was going through that with my compromised boots. Yeah, 33 degree water and sharp rocks -- just the thing to undo the duct tape and glue. Fortunately, though, I'd brought these along:



But let me tell you something. Until you've had to painstakingly navigate a slippery rock bridge in water just above the freezing point, on feet that are all but completely bare -- well, then you can't possibly understand why I was such a big whiny baby about it. The moment I stepped in, I could literally feel the warmth draining from my feet. (Yes, there was actually a draining feeling.) There were three of these bridges to cross, and I did each one coming and going. By the time I was finished each time, it felt like a thousand needles were pricking my feet.

It hurt. Waaaaah.

Once the pins and needles subsided, it took me about ten minutes to get the feeling back in my feet. Anyone who was completely immersed in that water would die quickly.

Anyhoo, it did the trick. I kept my boots dry, and they didn't blow out completely till there were only three miles left on the hike down. The sharp rocks of the glaciated landscape made perfect striations on the duct tape, and the soles completely detached. But I donned my sandals again, which have a lovely rugged tread on the soles, and continued on.

It was an odd day of temperature extremes, but delightful all the same.


Part V to come -- Wherein I finally shut my trap about this trip, put in a plug for the Glacier Institute, and post miscellaneous pictures.

Glacial Recession -- Part III

The thermometer back at the campground says 95 degrees, but the temperature near the edge of the glacier is at least twenty degrees cooler. In front of me is a massive, grinding river of ice streaked with deep crevasses and powerful enough to chew up mountains.

I’m a little apprehensive about stepping onto this beast, but our workshop instructor, Jeff, is exuberant. He’s already testing the strength of the glacier with his ice axe, listening for hollow, weak ice that won’t support our weight. “Stay to the left of that crevasse,” he advises as he builds a cairn, or pile of rocks, to mark our way. “Oh, and avoid that gray ice over there,” he adds as he moves ahead. Uh, okay. I follow his steps exactly.

Jeff leads us a short way onto the glacier. It’s not safe to go any farther, he says, as the tips of the crevasses extend only a few feet beyond where we’re standing. I look down. The ice beneath my feet seems almost iridescent. Rocks of varying sizes are liberally strewn on and embedded in the ice, accounting for its slightly dirty appearance from afar.

I stay rooted to my spot. Even with the cairns, I’d have an incredibly difficult time finding my way back across the ice safely. Two or three years ago, a day hiker ventured alone onto the glacier while his friends waited, and fell 35 feet into a crevasse. After much grueling work, the Park Service managed to extricate him from the crevasse, but he died shortly afterward.

Jeff talks about glacial formations and characteristics. He points out a moulin, which is a vertical shaft that runs down into the glacier. He reminds us of the discussion in An Inconvenient Truth about lakes forming beneath glaciers, and tells us that moulins like this facilitate the flow of water beneath the ice sheet.

This place is not quiet; different noises punctuate Jeff’s speech. You can hear the loud rush of water somewhere below, and once or twice a thunderous sound interrupted our discussion. Cracking ice.

Even though this glacier is a fraction of the size it was 150 years ago, it still seems just massive. I try to imagine this entire cirque covered in glacial ice, but it seems incomprehensible. But later on, when Jeff shows us how much of the glacier has disappeared just since last summer, the ice appears a good deal smaller.

My son may be lucky enough to see the park’s glaciers before they disappear entirely, but it’s unlikely his children will. The drop dead date for these glaciers is 2030; after that, like the snows of Kilimanjaro, they will be gone.


Part IV, coming soon: Wherein a tragic hiking boot blowout requires me to place my feet, for extended periods of time, into water that only a short time before had been ice.

Glacial Recession -- Part II

Now that I’ve offered an ominous opener, let me throw out this confusing fact: The glaciers in northwest Montana began to recede in the 1850’s. I know that all of you – astute observers of human history that you are -- will recognize that decade as preceding significant human-generated carbon emissions.

So what gives? This was the question the instructor, Jeff, posed during his introductory slide show. Is the recession of the park’s glaciers caused by humans or is it merely the result of a naturally occurring warming period?

It’s both, of course; the question poses a false dichotomy. Geologic history is peppered with alternating periods of glacial advance and retreat, and the earth had already entered a period of glacial retreat when we started energetically pumping carbon into the atmosphere. So while human activities may not have caused the glaciers to begin melting initially, it’s a safe bet that those activities have dramatically increased the rate, in recent times, at which the glaciers are melting.

Take a look at the picture below.



Where Jeff is standing marks the point to which the glacier extended just last year, and it will recede even further yet this year. And this is on the side of the glacier and not the “toe” – in laymen’s terms, the tip – of the glacier, where melting occurs most rapidly.

It’s also worth noting that this is the kind of thing you hear the wishful thinkers say all the time: “But the glaciers started melting long before the petroleum era, so it can’t be global warming! We’re just in a naturally occurring warming period!” The foundational facts are correct, to be sure -- the glaciers did begin to recede awhile ago, and we are in a natural warming period (or, as I understand it, the end of a much cooler period, which may not be exactly the same thing.) It’s the conclusion they reach that’s faulty. The era of human-generated carbon is coinciding with that period and elevating the planet’s temperature to the point of grim consequences.



Part III: Wherein I attempt to avoid becoming a permanent part of the glacier, as glacial recession, though occurring rapidly, will not happen quickly enough to free me from a crevasse should I be so unlucky as to fall into one.

Glacial Recession, Part I

This is Upper Grinnell Lake in Glacier National Park.

As late as 1969, there was no Upper Grinnell Lake. That's because what is now the lake used to be part of the Grinnell Glacier.

The lake gets bigger every year.