NPS Photo - Samuel Hooper
Glacier ice cascades down a rocky mountain face.
In the Mountains
Spitting rain obscured my vision as I squinted up at the 1200 ft cascade of jumbled ice. Gravity's unrelenting pressure was visually present in the cracks that riddled the frozen surface as the glacier descended the near vertical rock like a spiral staircase. I continued to stare at ice that seemed to spill so abundantly over bedrock as my GPS attempted to pinpoint my location at the edge of the active ice. Mike's and my task was to map the current terminus as part of the ongoing glacier monitoring program.
Standing so close to the massive icefall, it was hard to remind myself of the glacier's previous extent. As recently as 80 years ago, the ice used to stretch at least another mile into the valley it once carved inch by inch. This of course is the situation with nearly all of Denali's glaciers as well as most of the cryosphere around the world. In so many of the deep, U-shaped niches carved by the ancient ice of the Alaska Range, the glaciers responsible for their precipitous walls, flat gravel floors, and randomly strewn boulders have retreated to the furthest reaches of their headwaters.
After marking our last waypoint, Mike and I scaled the crumbling remnants of the glacier's moraine. In addition to mapping the terminus, we were in search of the location from which a historic photograph was taken of the main icefall. Periodically, I would pull the printed copy from a dry bag to compare with our current view. The volume of ice in the black and white photo was incomprehensible-the icefall in the photograph seemed to extend four times the width of the existing ice. All that stood now was a deflated flank presumably protected from the sun's rays by the peaks and spires that surrounded it.
Often times when I'm confronted by this landscape I can't help but dwell on its power, its sheer vastness, or the grandeur of its magnificent expanses. I use words to describe it like "infinite," "towering," or "massive"-something that might convey even a tiny thread of the experience of being surrounded by a landscape inconceivably more complex and unfathomably larger than myself. All of it suggests a permanence that immediately strikes any visitor or inhabitant of this land. Temporality is instantaneously suspended. On this patrol, however, I was offered a different view; it was clear that the land was in constant flux. The permanence dissolved into transience, the infinite was suddenly finite, and that omnipotence was replaced with a particular vulnerability.
The vulnerability evident was not just physical either. A few drainages to the east stands a cabin that reminded us of just how vulnerable the park's land can be. The structure is a relic of the park's mining history and a contentious battle for the park's borders. Throughout the 40's, 50's, and 60's private mining interests threatened to remove the entire watershed from the park for processing limestone into concrete. Conservationists fought the proposal through and through. Ultimately, the lack of economic viability for a cement production facility and associated projects saved the area from being withdrawn from Park Service land.The cabin soon after was deserted.
As Mike and I started our trek back to camp, I couldn't help but turn back for a few last glimpses of that impressive ice. The overcast clouds lifted occasionally to reveal crags and spires that loomed above the glacier. We still had another 7 miles to hike that evening so we couldn't linger for too long. As I stood watching the clouds conceal the peaks once more I had a startling realization: we were actually walking through where the ice once lay no more than a few decades ago. I felt the presence of the glacier similar to animal tracks on a sandy gravel bar-it wasn't the thing itself, but the knowledge that it once passed through where I now stood.
Both the cabin and the glacier remain physical reminders of the necessity for constant vigilance from those who care for this great land.
Samuel Hooper, Park Ranger
