Glaciers

Okay. After Mt. Edith Clavell, we started down the Icefield Parkway for the last time. So now perhaps is the time:  Let's talk glaciers.

Of all the amazing wonderful mind-blowing things we saw in the Rockies - and there were a ton of them - the glaciers were the most mind-blowing of all.

We hear a lot about glaciers now because of global climate change -- the melting of glaciers in Greenland and Alaska. We sort of get in an abstract sort of way: yeah, glaciers are "rivers" of ice that flow and ebb, advance and retreat. Yeah, one-half of the fresh water on earth is trapped in glaciers. None of that prepares you for walking in the valley left by a receding glacier.

In a land where immensity is the rule, the immensity of the glaciers -- not just their size, but their age, and what they've left behind and their SIZE.

 This is the Athatbasca Glacier. As recently as 1842, this whole valley, up to that snowline on the sides and all the way to where I'm standing to take this photo, was covered by this glacier.

Of course, this whole part of the Rockies owes it's very nature to glaciers. Some 240,000 years ago the whole area was covered in ice. During this period, the Great Glaciation, the Columbia Icefield was formed. Today the Columbia Icefield covers roughly 325 square kilometers (125 square miles). The ice ranges from 100 meters (330 feet) to 365 meters (1,198 feet) deep. The icefield receives 7 meters (28 feet) of snow each year.

But the icefield is not the glaciers, "merely" their source. The Columbia Icefield spawns some 30 distinct glaciers, the best known of which are Athabasca (above), Columbia, Snow Dome, Stutfield and Saskatchewan. Athabasca is the the most accessible.

In fact a company called Brewster has glacier walk tours. Giant buses called "ice crawlers" take you out onto the Athabasca Glacier.

 I don't know if this really helps the sense of scale but the tires on that ice crawler are nearly six feet tall.

The Athabasca Glacier is the most visited and one of the most studied glaciers in North America. It is currently receding at about 5 meters (16 feet) per year. Since reaching its greatest length in 1842, the Athabasca (don't you just love that word?) Glacier has receded more that 1.5 km (slightly less than a mile) and has lost half its mass.

That said, it is still 6 km (3.7 miles) long and covers an area of 6 sq km (2.3 sq mi). It has been measured at thicknesses of between 90 and 300 meters (300-980 feet).

As I wrote in the post about the glaciers on Mt. Edith Clavell, there is nothing abstract about these glaciers. They are a real, active, everyday part of life in these mountains, still changing and shaping the terrain after thousands of years.

And they are huge.

And totally mind-blowing.