North Cascades glaciers victims of climate change

HOLDEN VILLAGE, Chelan County — Lyman Glacier, sitting just below 8,459-foot Chiwawa Peak, is dying.

Nearby, Spider Glacier is already gone. The scientist who pronounced it dead three years ago thinks one-third of the glaciers in the North Cascades — including Lyman — are doomed.

Mauri Pelto says the other two-thirds may have a chance, if the world does something to stop climate change. Pelto is an environmental-science professor at Nichols College in Dudley, Mass., and has studied glaciers for more than two decades.

In August, he completed his 25th hiking trip to several North Cascade glaciers. He's been watching and measuring the great slabs of moving ice every year since 1984. It is the largest study of glaciers in the North Cascades, home to one-third of all glaciers in the Lower 48 states.

He visits 10 glaciers every year for in-depth measurements, and monitors 37 others with less-regular trips. Five of them have already died, and all of the glaciers he's studying are now retreating. They've lost 20 to 40 percent of their volume.

Pelto says when he first learned about climate change as a graduate student at the University of Maine, before he started this study, he was skeptical.

"I'd been to a couple conferences related to global warming, and as a skier, I hated the idea. I was looking to find a hole in the argument," he says.

Instead, he found the science convincing.

Ronald Reagan was president, and the National Academy of Sciences was calling for someone to monitor glaciers across an entire mountain range. Pelto says government science budgets across the nation were being cut, and he knew no one would likely take on the academy's recommendation.

Took challenge

So he decided to take the challenge himself by making it his graduate thesis. He started the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project, which he intends to be a 50-year study of nearly 50 glaciers in the North Cascades.

He chose specific glaciers to represent different geographical features across the North Cascades — some are high-elevation, some are lower, some are north-facing, some face south, some are in Western Washington, and some — like Lyman — are on the east side of the range.

Now 46, a husband, father, professor, and halfway through his commitment, Pelto finds it hard to believe that anyone still questions that global warming is real.

He wonders what has to happen before people are convinced that the climate is changing. "What's the straw that's going to break the camel's back?"

Pelto says he also wonders how people — especially those who depend on water from the glacier-fed rivers, lakes and streams on the east and west slopes of the Cascades — will react once they realize what it means to lose these frozen reservoirs of water.

At the headwaters of the Chiwawa River Valley, a few miles into the Henry M. Jackson Wilderness, the trail opens out to alpine Spider Meadow, filled with late-summer flowers. It's a popular spot for both foot and horse campers.

Pelto and his team arrive at dusk on Aug. 10, set up the tent, have a quick dinner, get to bed and then wake early the next day for the steep climb to Lyman Glacier.

Leaving the meadow as the sun creeps over the peaks, they climb 2,300 vertical feet in a few long miles to Spider Gap before dropping down another 1,000 feet over a snowfield and across an unstable rock scree to the glacier. It's one of nine glaciers they'll visit on this two-week trip. Altogether, they'll hike over 100 miles and climb about 35,000 feet.

Lyman Glacier and its lakes are at the headwaters of Railroad Creek, which flows past Holden Village into Lake Chelan and then the Columbia River.

Pelto's team this year includes his 18-year-old son, Ben; Brad Markle, 22, a recent Pomona College graduate from Corvallis, Ore.; and Tom Hammond, an avid hiker and network engineer at the University of Washington and Pelto's field scientist.

The hike here was tough, eyes kept to the feet to keep from stumbling.

They immediately get to work, screwing together a heavy steel probe that they systematically punch through the snow until it hits ice. It measures how much snowpack remains from last winter.

Repeat measuring

They repeat this every 100 meters, or 330 feet, back and forth across the glacier.

"We're trying to get a mass balance, how much snow it gains versus how much it loses," Pelto says. "It's like balancing your checkbook," he says — if you continuously take out more money than you put in, eventually you run out.

Unless there's an unseasonably cool fall or early winter this year, Pelto predicts, Lyman Glacier will shrink again this year. Only 11 feet of snowpack were left at the deepest spot on the glacier by mid-August. In past years, he says, 10 to 12 feet of snow has melted from this glacier between mid-August and first snowfall.

Pelto has visited this glacier 12 times since he first came to take measurements in 1986. This is not one of the 10 glaciers under intensive study, but he tries to come here often.

This glacier is more than a quarter of a mile long and about half as wide. It's about one-third its former size, Pelto said. Since the Little Ice Age in about 1890, the glacier has receded about 1,365 meters — a couple hundred meters short of a mile. For the last 50 years, it's retreated about 33 feet per year.

He predicts it will disappear completely in 30 to 50 years.