The Melting Point
Whether or not you believe in global warming, the fact remains that a vast majority of the world’s glaciers are shrinking. By Jack Boulware • Photographs by Sean McCormick • Type photographed by Pat Haverfield
At 11,239 feet, Mount Hood measures as the tallest peak in Oregon. Inside the offices of the Timberline Mountain Guides (TMG), Joe Owens and Phil Bowker introduce themselves to our one-day climbing class. Coincidentally, both guides are originally from Ireland, and between the two of them, they have experience scaling summits all over the world. ¶ Our group of 10 sits on benches, decked out in fleece and equipped with crampons and axes. Mountaineering is one of those activities that require a lot of gear. We all look extremely professional.
Early tomorrow morning, we will return to this room and then head up Mount Hood in the dark. There will be one major difference, though: While the rest of the class will attempt to reach the summit, my destination will be the White River Glacier.
White River is one of 11 glaciers on Mount Hood, and according to data compiled by Portland State University (PSU), it has already lost 61 percent of its volume. Whether you believe in global warming or insist that climate change is a figment of Al Gore’s fevered imagination, you need only compare aerial photos of just about any glacier — including White River — taken over the years to notice a problem: In the most elemental terms, there’s less white than before.
According to PSU geography and geology professor Andrew Fountain, the melting of alpine glaciers in particular is considerably affecting the planet’s sea levels. “These guys are melting like crazy,” says Fountain, whose research team studies glaciers throughout the American West. “Right now, they’re making the most significant contribution to sea-level change, other than thermal expansion of the seawater.”
Although at present the planet is growing warmer, studies conducted in Antarctica by Fountain’s team have found that glaciers at the bottom of the world are neither growing nor shrinking. “They are in wonderful equilibrium,” Fountain says. “[But they’re] kind of the exception to the rule.”
Those in Antarctica aside, the vast majority of the world’s tens of thousands of glaciers are undeniably receding. Here in the United States, glacial melting is an accepted fact. A new study from the National Climatic Data Center indicates that 2006 was the nation’s warmest year in history. Glacier National Park in Montana has only 27 glaciers remaining out of approximately 150; it’s estimated that by the middle of this century, nearly all the park’s glaciers will be gone. Some studies are even predicting that by 2100, ski season in the United States could run only from Christmas to President’s Day, with that being the best-case scenario.
Which is why I’m here at White River. It’s easy enough to view a glacier from a plane, but some part of me wants to see one up close, within the confines of the Lower 48. I want to feel the cold under my boots and descend down into the belly of an ice mass hundreds of years old — before it disappears into a photo archive.
BY THE TIME my glacier-expedition posse meets, at 4:30 a.m., the other groups have already departed for the summit. My guide, Jon Bates, another TMG employee, double-checks my gear and hands me a helmet lamp.
Guides get to climb to the summit of Mount Hood every week, he says, so glacier tours are more fun for them.
We climb inside a Sno-Cat and chug up the permafrost of the Palmer ski run, the treads easily navigating the crunchy snow. Halfway up the trail, we encounter Bowker and some of the folks from yesterday’s class walking back down the slope with glum expressions. “They turned back,” observes Bates. I never find out why.
Weather is often the key factor. My trip here was postponed for two weeks because of snow and rain.
“You could come up,” Steve Baldwin, the guide company’s codirector, had told me over the phone. “But it would be like being inside a ping-pong ball.”
Fortunately, today there are supposed to be clear skies. The Sno-Cat stops at 8,500 feet, the top of the Palmer ski lift, and lets us out. We hike up another 200 feet toward the summit and then put on our crampons, cut across the slope laterally, and step onto the White River Glacier.
I immediately notice the distinct odor of sulfur, which seeps from fumaroles in the main crater above us; the gas stains the rocks yellow. Although the mountain hasn’t erupted in a few hundred years, it’s still technically a volcano — comforting thought.
I look back at the buildings far below. They look like Monopoly pieces. Over time, the glacier has carved out four moraines of churned-up dirt and rocks, which finger their way down to the tree line. You don’t have to be a geologist to realize that the ice mass we’re standing on was once two-thirds larger.
“The old-timers around here will tell you it used to go all the way to the lodge,” says Bates.
It’s difficult to find someone at Mount Hood who doesn’t believe in global warming and glacial retreat, because everyone here is on mountains every day, and they see it for themselves.
Yesterday, Owens told our class that he had been climbing in Ecuador and that the glaciers there are shrinking, in part, because of deforestation. If there are no trees to trap the tropical warm air, he said, it simply rises up the mountains and melts the ice.
The snow-crusted ice surface feels soft to the touch at first, but it’s surprisingly difficult to grab with a glove. I scrape up a handful. The crystals are huge, and it looks like I’m holding a pile of diamonds. Bates explains that because the water molecules have melted and refrozen, they are larger than those found in snow that formed in clouds.
“On a windy day, it’s really tough,” he says, smiling. “Goes right in your face.” Don’t bother eating it, he adds. The black specks are volcanic soot.
Bates points to the west, and we see a dark triangular shape looming on top of the cloud layer — the shadow of Mount Hood, created by the rising sun. It’s amazing how perfect the triangle is, as if somebody has drawn the lines with a ruler.
He ropes us together, about six feet apart. If someone slips and falls, the others will dig in with their axes, feet, and hands.
A few years ago, locals conducted a test up near the summit. They dressed a sack of potatoes in Gore-Tex clothing and tossed it down the slope. Within mere seconds, a laser gun clocked the sack’s speed at 90 miles per hour. In other words, if you’re not on a rope and you happen to slip, you have about about one and a half seconds to somehow pin yourself to the mountain — or you’re toast.
Our crampons crunch across the surface. We drop down into a bowl, and suddenly, there is nothing except the jagged peaks above and white on all sides. It’s a perfect Henry David Thoreau–John Muir moment — nature’s exquisite solace at 8,000 feet. The only sounds are of rocks tumbling down a nearby moraine. Loosened by the morning warmth, the stones kick up puffs of dust as they bounce down the mountain.
Each day, a glacier appears slightly different, altered by wind, snow, sun, and the natural slow process of sliding down the mountainside. According to Fountain, Hood’s glaciers will move, at the most, 30 feet a year. This is what some climbers jokingly refer to as a “congressional pace.”
We continue across to a crevasse, a razor-blade gash created by the glacier’s persistent downward motion. Because snowfields don’t move, they don’t have crevasses, which, potentially, can extend all the way to the bedrock below. These deep crevices are a climber’s nightmare, especially when they’re hidden underneath a layer of fresh snow. Mountaineering training involves a lot of crevasse rescue.
Bates unhooks himself from the line and creeps up to the lip. He pounds in an anchor and descends down about 20 feet to the bottom. The snow-covered floor feels solid, and I’m allowed to check it out.
The first thing you notice when you’re inside a crevasse is how blue the ice is; it’s a hue you’ve never seen before. This particular crevasse is small, perhaps six feet across, with walls of striated layers that have formed over hundreds of years, each stratum depicting a season.
On the summit side, the wall is amazingly smooth, beveled and polished by nature’s freakish force. The opposite side, though, is rough and crumbling with snow, as a result of less sunlight each day. The floor descends down into who knows what. In two hours, once this crevasse has been softened by the sun, it will be much too dangerous to explore.
Bates shows me how to climb back up the wall using my crampons and axes, and we continue down the glacier’s slope.
The next crevasse we come to is much larger — it’s actually two gashes, with a snow bridge in the center. Bates goes ahead with a rope, turns a screw into the ice wall, and anchors a safety line across the bridge and down to the bottom.
I grab on to the line and follow it down, punching my toes into the snow for support. This crevasse plunges much deeper than the other one does, perhaps 40 or 50 feet down to the floor. A jagged hole allows me to peek even farther into the glacier’s bowels. It looks supremely uninviting, dirty and lined with sharp-edged rock formations.
WE CLAMBER BACK out and come upon a snow cliff that’s essentially a 45-degree drop of a few hundred feet; it ends on a snowy ledge that’s maybe three stories below us. Bates suggests that we do some rappelling. He digs a T-shaped hole in the ice and constructs a support anchor.
Now, in the movies, rappelling down a vertical surface always looks cool. I mean, whether it’s done by waves of ninja assassins or by Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction, it just seems like a fun adrenaline rush, right? Carrying a knife in your teeth, you’re on a mission to bust out some political hostages.
Uh-huh. Right. What the movies never show is that unless you want to leave a $200 rope behind, you have to climb back up. And unless you have the upper body strength of an ape, this is extremely difficult.
Thus, I find myself struggling back up the slope, using only an ice ax in each hand and my crampons. The snow keeps disintegrating under my boots, leaving me dangling by the axes. While I know this is standard climbing procedure for professional mountaineers, my muscles are finely tuned for typing, not hoisting deadweight up a cliff.
After much flailing, I finally crawl up and over the ledge, panting like a dehydrated marathoner right before he is stuffed into an ambulance.
We take a break for water, and I ask Bates if there’s any wildlife this high up on the mountain. Not much at all, he answers, except for ravens. “They’re excellent food robbers. They’ll spy an open backpack and fly away with your sandwich.”
Fortunately, the probability of sandwich theft is low today — we’ll be down the mountain before noon.
We begin our descent and traverse diagonally across the face of the glacier, a white cliff about 500 feet high. Our boots stomp a foot deep in the snow, leaving a virgin trail across the surface. It’s exhausting.
The sun’s warmth has made the glacier more dangerous, but it has also made the mountain come alive. Water trickles underneath the snow. Insects swirl about our faces. Steam hisses from rocks drying in the sun.
We pack up our gear and descend along a trail. On the adjacent Palmer run, snowboarders are “shralping the gnar” and doing stunts off a ramp. It’s turning into a beautiful, clear sunny day on Mount Hood — perfect for some activities, but, over time, the worst possible weather for the life of a glacier.
JACK BOULWARE is based in San Francisco and writes regularly for a variety of publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Playboy, and Salon.com. He is a cofounder of San Francisco’s annual Litquake literary festival.
According to Science Express, the world’s melting glaciers could add between four and 10 inches to the global sea level this century.
Currently about five miles in length, the Pasterze is Austria’s longest glacier, and it has shrunk 1.2 miles since it was first measured in 1889.
Peru’s Cordillera Blanca is the tropics’ most ice-covered mountain range and home to the Ururashraju glacier, which has retreated three-tenths of a mile since 1986.
Because of the receding glaciers in Europe, more and more European ski teams go to Oregon to ski Mount Hood.
Switzerland’s glaciers lost 18 percent of their surface area between 1985 and 2000. In the Alps, the average loss was 22 percent. A study by Zurich University has found that if temperatures were to rise by five degrees, the Alps would become almost completely ice-free by 2100.