The white-capped world into which Hazard Stevens and Phi-
lemon Beecher Van Trump clambered is disappearing. Ice
cloaked the Cascade Range long before Mount Rainier’s vol-
canic cone rose 500,000 years ago. Although Rainier remains
the most glaciated American peak outside Alaska, in the last
50 years its ice fields have shrunk at least 14 percent.
Four have disappeared.
Many scientists blame global warming. Since 1895 the
average Pacific Northwest temperature has risen 1.4° Fahren-
heit. Forecasting is difficult in regions where mountain and
ocean weather systems collide, but digital models predict that
this century will see temperatures continue to climb, with
more precipitation taking the form of rain instead of snow.
This scenario spells trouble for Rainier’s 26 named glaciers,
formed in prehistory when heavy snowpack in the high, fro-
zen reaches of the mountain compressed into slow-moving
rivers of ice. When a glacial system is in balance, each winter
new ice accumulates, keeping pace with losses incurred
through summer melting at the system’s foot. At Rainier, this
is no longer happening. Between 1970 and 2008, only two of
the peak’s glaciers gained volume. For a decade, the Nisqually
Glacier, on which Van Trump lost his climbing staff, has been
shrinking in length an average 140 feet annually. The Para-
dise-Stevens Glacier, which feeds the waterfall that raged
beside the first summiteers’ base camp, has lost well over half
of its mass and now comprises two stagnant ice fields.
Glacial melting is a part of normal climate variation;
Rainier’s glaciers have fluctuated in size for millennia. Thir-
ty-five thousand years ago, the now four-mile long Cowlitz
Glacier stretched 60 miles to the mountain’s southeast.
What’s troubling today is the speed of melting—estimated at
six times the historic rate—and the consequent dwindling of
a vital regional water source.
Ecologists and engineers cringe at the long view. As tem-
peratures rise and glaciers recede, so do the alpine and
sub-alpine habitats of signature Rainier residents like pink
mountain heather, a ground cover, and the shrill-whistling
pika, a small herbivore. Accelerated run-off is dumping dis-
proportionate amounts of debris—boulders, gravel, and silt
glaciers scraped from the mountain as they creep—into the
five major river systems that Rainier’s ice fields feed.
As a result, river beds are rising; today’s Nisqually flows
some 40 feet higher than in 1910. Other streams are rerout-
ing themselves, sometimes through trails, roads, and camp-
grounds. The National Park Service has built dikes and
levees to protect key infrastructure and the settlement
of Longmire, now 29 feet below the Nisqually. A major
flood, like one in 2006 that did $36 million in damage and
closed the park for six months, easily could overwhelm
these locales, threatening access for the 1.7 million people
lured to the park annually by Rainier’s ever-changing
charms. —Jessica Wambach Brown
83 Years’ Difference
A 1934 photo of Paradise Valley and
Stevens glaciers, top, contrasts with
the bare rock visible in 2017.
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JUNE 2019 49
Melting Away