A Peek Inside the Wheeler Cirque Glacier

This article was originally published in The Midden – Great Basin National Park: Vol. 21, No. 1, Summer 2021.

View into the crevasse on the Wheeler Cirque Glacier.

NPS Photo by Gretchen Baker

By Gretchen Baker, Ecologist

I’ve trekked on glaciers in Alaska, Mt. Rainier, New Zealand, and Argentina, but had never gotten a really good look at Great Basin’s Wheeler Cirque Glacier. I was able to remedy that in September 2020. I received an email in the spring of 2020 from some glacier enthusiasts who are trying to bring more awareness of glaciers retreating. They came to the Park in September. That happens to be a good time to get a look at the glacier, so I invited them along as I re-photographed the ice glacier from about the same vantage point it was photographed in 1958.

As we looked at the old photo and tried to find the same place, we realized just how much the glacier had shrunk. The dark line on the rock was much higher, and more rock was visible. Even more telling was that the people who were walking on some rocks on the glacier in 1958 were walking on a gentle slope, while in 2020 the slope is quite steep. We estimated that the ice level was about 40-60 feet lower in 2020 than in 1958.

After getting the photo, I wanted to take a look inside the crevasse. I secured my crampons, grabbed my ice axe, and climbed up to the crevasse. Upon arriving, I took out the DistoX, a laser we use for cave surveying, and measured the deepest spot in the crevasse, which was about 20 feet deep. The back side of the crevasse consisted of rock, and the front side was all ice, some of which was melting. It was strange reflecting on how much of the cirque the glacier used to cover. During the last Ice Age, it flowed down the Lehman Creek drainage to about the distance of Mather Overlook. During a previous Ice Age, it flowed even farther, stopping just short of Upper Lehman Campground.

Today we have lots of evidence of these past glaciers, with moraines, cirques, and more. The glacial ice, both exposed and in the rock glacier, helps provide a water source in late summer, when many other water sources have dried up. The cool ice supports a flock of gray-crowned and black rosy finches, who fly from one spot to another to eat insects that have fallen into the snow and ice. For the moment, we still have a tiny alpine glacier above the rock glacier, but based on the rapid warming the Park is experiencing, it is likely to disappear in the near future.