The GD Ephemeral Media

We overlooked the Coleman Glacier and listened to a bunch of yahoos say a bunch of things on the side of Mount Baker over the summer. I don’t mean to be so judgmental, but you have to understand that we had barely spoken to a soul all week. Glacier, Washington is all but boarded up during the summer. 

A guy came by to unlock the hot tub at the Airbnb. The host had denied the thing was locked, then insisted the key was where it wasn’t. The hot tub guy took great pains to let us know that he'd been forced to interrupt his dinner, all so we could say “ahhh.” 

A couple walking up the trail had yielded to us as we descended, but they grumbled something about people on the way up having right of way. We didn’t go to a gas station, because the rental car was involuntarily electric. There didn’t seem to be more than two or three restaurants around town, and none of them were open.

“If we’re in Washington, does that mean we’re close to Alaska?” a teen on our third hike asked.

Barely a soul, and now this.

We’d seen more people on this hike to the edge of this glacier than we had since leaving Seattle. The new faces were not unwelcome. At a minimum, meeting people is supposed to be one of the more enriching parts of travel. Whenever I write these things, people are curious about the characters who pop up in all these places. So we had an open mind, at first, as we listened to these high schoolers yap.

“You wouldn't really fall down this cliff it’s much less steep than it looks. And if you did, you’d survive anyway. I know I would catch myself.”

“How far about do you think that is? I could throw a football and hit it.” *throws rock over to try to hit glacier; falls short*

“Wow. Look at that. That ain’t melting any time soon.” *continues wearing cowboy hat*

We’re all making the glaciers melt. Some more than others, but we’re all doing it. Some days, they get enough snow, and it stays cold, so they advance. I’ll stay home, swear off beef, or try to limit my breathing. On another day, I’ve ice climbed on the side of the Mer de Glace, blindly hacking and kicking stick my ice tools into it. With each swing, I knocked off shards of ice hundreds of years old. Shallow strikes made plates of ice come loose and shatter into a million little pieces. 

I’d heard a climber in a documentary call ice an ephemeral medium. You never know how stable it is, how long it’ll stick around, he’d said. So I found ice climbing to be pretty frightening the first time. I didn’t fancy leaving myself hanging on something that I knew was bound to melt. I don’t like to rush. 

Here at the glacier, it was the last week of July, a time when the New York City subway gets so hot and humid eggs poach in their shells. I’d gotten into the habit of wearing a t shirt to the office, then changing upon arrival, so fed up was I with the weight of the heat and of Oxford cloth. That there was anywhere on earth free from the thickness of the New York summer felt hard to believe. I never dreamed there could still be ice and never dreamed it would be in the lower 48. 

The audacity to stare at this glacier, I fumed, and think that. Think that when the end was caked in dirt and dust like the before part of a Swiffer commercial. At home, there are so many layers of people and pipes and heat that the snow almost never sticks on the sidewalk. The gall to not appreciate the impossibility of hundreds of years of accumulated snow. 

I realized though, that I’d rapidly become the asshole, as I scoffed to myself about how these people obviously had never seen the signs marking how far the glacier in Chamonix had once reached, and how far it had melted. The French, experts in the field of glacial retreat, get the point across well. 

A couple weeks ago, I went running in Brookline, MA. Near the reservoir, I saw a small pile of snow in the shade under some trees. Shocked, I spent the rest of my jog convincing myself that, maybe if they plowed all the snow from the whole town over the whole winter into one pile, and it never saw the sun, it might not melt. Boston is a lot colder than New York, I told myself. I remembered throwing a snowball in July in the Tuckerman Ravine in New Hampshire. This is after all where glaciers come from, I resolved.

I’d been chastened already by another hike in Washington. We walked from near the top of the Mt. Baker ski area, down into a valley, then up one of the shoulders of Mt. Baker’s neighbor, Shuksan, to Lake Ann. Alltrails had warned that the lake might still be frozen over, even in July. It would also be buggy. I thought about the subway, scoffed, and packed a towel. I love to swim on a hike. 

150 years ago, an offhand tidbit in a book told me, there would be a point in the winter when the Hudson was no longer navigable. I can’t imagine it froze solid, but enough ice must’ve come down from upstate to keep the ships at bay. Once, too much wintertime ice was linked with starvation. Today, the people at Dunkin Donuts over-fill the cup with ice to screw me out of my marginal coffee. The world has changed. There’s no way there’s still ice on that lake. 

Stubborn, I made my contribution to the ice melt, wading in up to my calves. I really wanted to dunk; I’d never been in water next to an iceberg. But what if my heart stopped? Who was I to play Titanic?

I like to go places. I concentrate best when moving, regardless of where I’m in between. Could be a walk, a bike ride, a transcontinental flight. A lot of trips have a time component, whether aiming for the shoulder season to minimize crowds, or visiting San Francisco in 2019 at its erstwhile high-water mark. Some things, I know, I’ve missed - at one point Anthony Bourdain was able to live on the Upper West Side and take a cab to work every single day while living on a medium-time chef’s salary. That’s over.

Climbers who talk about ice as an ephemeral medium do so not to capture their fear (the first rule of ice climbing is don’t fall) but rather to articulate how a given mixed climbing route up Mt. Robson could transform year over year. In contrast, El Cap stands solid in its granite, trustworthy and stable where the ice is slippery and unsteady. 

But within that granite, Warren Harden drills bolts, and Royal Robbins chops them off. One climbing legend brings industry, the other promotes nature and purism. The cracks expand, weakening the rock. Things change slowly, but every now and then people yell “rock!” as they calve off and fall down. I saw a car recently with a “RIP Man in the Mountain, 2003” sticker. Or, people create a Hetch Hetchy dam and flood a valley, or they store their munitions in the wrong place and blow up the Parthenon. One of these days, the Mariposa Grove will catch fire. A hurricane comes, and half of Asheville is washed away. 

The subway hasn’t quite cooled off yet, but in Boston the leaves are turning. The ice pile will start growing again because hockey season is coming back around, and they’ll zamboni the rink and leave the runoff over there, 30 feet away, under that tree. A hockey team from Florida won the Stanley Cup this year. It was never leftover snow, was it. 

The Coleman Glacier is alive, flowing downhill a few centimeters a year, melting at the bottom and replenishing less and less up top. Even if I took a bath on my guarantee there would be no ice on that lake, I’m quite sure that glacier isn’t growing.

There’s a stream coming out of Lake Ann, but none going in. Fed by snowmelt, it’s just an expensive puddle. Each spring, the snow brings a bit more sediment and raises the bottom. Over time, sediment accumulates, the snow disappears, and evaporation kicks in. This lake and its ice are not long for this world, geologically speaking. 

A few miles away from Lake Ann are the Baker Hot Springs. We didn’t visit. I’m not huge into public bathing, but the option is out there because Mt. Baker is very much an active volcano. Any second now, it could go up, melting the glaciers in a flash. Or, the glaciers can take the long way out, melted by our jet fuel and planetary meat sweats. Either way, it’s going, all this stuff except the plastic packaging is headed out, and maybe soon.

But you’d better go catch it, because boy is it quality. And I didn’t even mention the wildflowers!