Words & Photos by Lynn Martel
Five years ago, my book, Stories of Ice: Adventure Commerce and Creativity on Canada’s Glaciers, was published.
Having a book released in the middle of a global pandemic is not something I would wish for any author. Still, since publishing timelines are set many months, even years ahead, the process is a bit like wishing for a perfect snowpack when you book next winter’s lodge trip.
I didn’t write Stories of Ice to tell individual stories, but to convey the broader story of what glaciers mean to us in Western Canada. I chose each story like adding another snowflake to the layers of how glaciers have shaped Canadians’ lives, and how they continue to. These stories are timeless.
Canada’s landscape was shaped by glaciers over repeated ice ages. Glaciers shaped BC’s mountains, from the Rockies to the Coast Mountains and all the ranges in between. The first humans arrived in North America after the major valley-bottom glaciers of the last Ice Age had melted, some 11,000 (Rockies) to 14,000 (Coast) years ago. The fur trade that brought Europeans to Canada’s West was in part fueled by the Little Ice Age that chilled the North Atlantic region from the 1600s to the 1900s. The railway that connects Canada’s east and west coasts – completed in 1885 – brought our first glacier viewing tourists, along with hotels, horse outfitters and climbers.
When I see glaciers – particularly in western Canada – I don’t just see ancient ice. I see stories. From the first Swiss guides to hike up the Death Trap at Lake Louise, to Mary Vaux and her brothers conducting North America’s first glacier science on the Illecillewaet, to Guy Edwards and John Millar skiing the Coast Mountains traverse for half a year in 2001. From Byron Harmon’s photos of Lake of the Hanging Glacier to today’s Instagrammers.
Anyone connected to Western Canada’s backcountry skiing community will recognize a lot of names on these pages, from Collie and Thompson’s outrageous 1897 crevasse rescue on the Wapta Icefield, to Hans Gmoser’s legendary backcountry skiing weeks in Little Yoho’s deep 1950s snowpacks, to Tannis Dakin watching Nordic Glacier shrink from season to season from Sorcerer Lodge’s living room window over three decades.
Glacier stories flow through the snowpack of all our lives.
I feel the fact we have stories to share makes our glaciers that much more valuable. Glaciers are inhospitable environments, and many of the experiences we share with friends and partners on them are out of the ordinary. Cold, harsh winds, heavy packs, mysterious crevasses, exquisitely beautiful arches and caves. That makes them extra worthy of celebrating, especially as they melt, much, much faster than they’ve ever melted at any other time in the history of humans living on Earth.
I’ve enjoyed sharing lots of Stories of Ice slide shows over these five years, with climbing clubs, schools, environmental groups and corporate getaways. As an IGA-certified Interpretive Hiking Guide, I’ve led glacier storytelling workshops for my colleagues and the general public. My shows include dozens and dozens of fabulous photos to accompany the stories, and who doesn’t love looking at spectacular glacier photos? Some of the stories are darned funny too, which nicely balances out the melting aspect. Wild things can happen on glaciers.
Earlier this year, I wrote a feature article for Alberta Views magazine about MELTDOWN: A Drop in Time photo exhibit now on display at the Columbia Icefield Centre until 2027, accessible to viewers when the centre reopens in spring.
“The images were downright jaw-dropping. Giant prints—some wider than many living room walls—featured sculpted, polished and glimmering blue glacier ice, some resembling splendid precious gems. Others showed no ice at all. Dry rock, bare, sharp ridgelines, rubbly moraine slopes, naked cliff bands. Dark, dirty, dry and withered ice. Dying ice. On one hand, the ultimate eye candy for a glacier lover; on the other, a bitter aftertaste of reality.”
For me, this paragraph sums up how many of us feel watching glaciers we know, glaciers with roles in the stories of our own lives, melt and slowly – or not so slowly – diminish.
Meltdown is the project of alpine and ice climbing hardman Jim Elzinga, in partnership with cinematographer Roger Vernon. Watching the routes he pioneered in the 1980s disappear inspired Elzinga to found Guardians of the Ice, a non-profit focused on the steadily shrinking Columbia Icefield as an indicator of the worldwide climate crisis.
Elizinga chose the large-scale photo format to immerse viewers in an IMAX-like experience. “I feel this is the best way to create an emotional connection with the viewer and provide them with an experience as if they were actually in the mountains. Our purpose is to effectively engage the public to build support for a low-carbon future.”
Toward this end, Elzinga is a partner with the 2025 United Nations International Year of Glaciers Preservation. I am a partner too.
The IYGP was proposed in 2022 by Tajikistan, whose 13,000 glaciers supply the mountain headwaters of Central Asia and serve some 2 billion people downstream. Most of the world’s glaciated countries are participating, and with Switzerland’s glaciers having lost 10 per cent of their volume in two years alone—2022 and 2023—that country and France announced significant commitments.
The Year’s purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system and water cycle, as well as the far-reaching impacts of rapid glacier melt. For our part, a full quarter of Earth’s remaining ice is found in Canada, with some 18,000 glaciers in the mountain west, 16,000 in BC.
A 2015 study found that western Canada would lose 60 to 80 per cent of its glacier ice by 2100, with the bulk of the melting occurring between 2020 and 2040.
And I’ve since wondered, what would the melting look like?
The answer has become more visible since the 2021 Heat Dome that roasted western Canada. For excellent info about Canada’s glaciers and their melt pace, visit www.unglacieryear.ca
For my part, I’m always finding more stories. I shared some in the Summer/Fall issue of Columbia Valley magazine, The Trench. I spoke about the value of glacier storytelling on a panel with filmmaker Roger Vernon, Leanne Allison, and Swiss photographer Jean-Francois Delhom at the Fire and Ice Symposium at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in November.
And every summer, I spend my free days hiking with my camera to various favourite glaciers, many of them not studied by scientists, but well-known to backcountry skiers.
It’s not easy photographing the melting, thin, dehydrated, shrivelling ice. New rock buttresses are exposed, like on Mount Hector. I would have liked to visit Abbot Pass Hut once more. I expect we’ll soon learn sections of the Rockies’ Great Divide alpine traverse are no longer skiable.
But it’s been said that the best way to fight grief is to seek joy.
And I find joy amidst our glaciers.
Sometimes brilliant blue ice. Sculpted icebergs floating in turquoise melt pools. Salmon Glacier last summer was spectacular.
And I’m learning the landscape that emerges after the ice melts. It’s a raw, wild, primal landscape. Fascinating rock formations. I’ve learned which plants move in first – Mountain Avens, and willow bushes. Stonecrop. It’s a rebirth after centuries, millennia of ice blanketing that land.
We honour our glaciers by sharing their stories.
Lynn Martel has published three books with Rocky Mountain Books, plus 10 biographical booklets and countless articles about the people, places and unique culture of western Canada’s mountain world. View her books, photography or hire her for a Stories of Ice presentation at www.lynnmartel.ca
For other stories of ice, check out our blog Year of the Glacier.