Overview:
After a hot, dry Colorado summer, St. Mary's Glacier, the longtime summer snowfield near Idaho Springs, has completely melted.
Guest story about St. Mary’s Glacier reported by Blair Ewalt for Bucket List Community News from just outside of Idaho Springs, Colo.
For generations, swaths of Front Range hikers would put on their hiking boots and head up to St. Mary’s Glacier for the prospect of touching snow in the middle of the summer. Fans of winter sports were able to ski their way down the snowfield in the middle of July for a hit of brumal adrenaline.
As of last week, the freeze atop the old mining village of Alice has completely melted.
The loss raises a question that glaciologists have quietly answered for years: St. Mary’s Glacier was never a glacier at all. A true glacier is a mass of ice that moves under its own weight. St. Mary’s is a semi-permanent snowfield, a bank of snow and ice that historically survived from one winter to the next but does not flow.
The name has always been more marketing than science. Now even the “semi-permanent” part is in doubt.
I took a trip to the historic trail last week and decided to see the melt for myself. To be completely honest, I went up to see the glacier in its glory, with the knowledge that it has been shrinking year over year, and was surprised to see that it had completely melted due to a hot summer and low precipitation.
I was a bit bewildered. The lake below, aptly named St. Mary’s Lake, was a sight for sore eyes, but I found myself asking, “Where is the glacier?”
The last time I visited St. Mary’s Glacier, I was a child. I remember it was a challenging hike, but nowhere near what I was about to take on. In my Chuck Taylors and light hoodie, I started the long and rocky hike to the top. I decided I wouldn’t stop until I had reached the glacier, or what was left of it. After summiting the hill, I realized the glacier had completely melted.
Where the snowfield used to stretch down the basin, there was only granite, loose scree, and a few streams of water flowing from under the rocks. I stood there for a while, catching my breath and trying to line up what I was looking at with the picture I had carried around since childhood.
The memory had a wall of white in it. The real thing had a pile of rocks.
I wasn’t the only one who seemed caught off guard. A handful of other hikers wandered around the base stretch of trail, phones out, scanning the hillside as if the glacier might be hiding just over the next ridge. It wasn’t. The melt was total, and it was hard not to feel like we had all shown up to a party a little too late.
Colorado’s high country has had a rough year. A hot summer and a stingy season for rain and snow have taken a toll across the state, and St. Mary’s is one of the most visible casualties. It’s one thing to read about shrinking snowpack in a headline. It’s another to stand in the spot where you once touched snow in July and find nothing but bare earth.
On the hike back down, my Chuck Taylors took a beating, and I had plenty of time to think. Snow will fall again this winter, and there’s a chance St. Mary’s builds itself back up, at least for a while. But the snowfield that generations of Coloradans grew up with, the one you could count on to be there when the city was baking, may not be something we can count on anymore.
As I walked back to my car, I passed the trailhead sign still reading “Glacier Hike.” It’s a nice promise. This summer, it just wasn’t one the mountain could keep.
