In Northern Canada Peaks, Scientists Are Tracking Impact of Vanishing Ice
In the summer of 1955, a floatplane flew a small group of American climbers to the edge of a massive icefield straddling the Continental Divide along the Yukon/Northwest Territories border in northern
Canada. When the group saw the cluster of jagged peaks and sheer rock walls they were searching for, they were stunned: Emerging from the edges of the Brintnell/Bologna icefield was a 9,000-foot palisade of ice-polished granite that bore an uncanny resemblance to the craggy spires of Yosemite.
Having underestimated the challenge he and his team would confront that day, expedition leader Arnold Wexler turned to his partners and declared most of the icy peaks to be “unclimbable.” Today, still largely untrodden because of its extreme remoteness, the “Cirque of the Unclimbables” remains legendary in the world of rock climbing.
All photos by Ed Struzik.
Now, however, the region is the focus of Canadian scientists for another reason: its vanishing ice. This month, I accompanied a group of Canadian researchers monitoring the retreat of the icefields surrounding the “Cirque of the Unclimbables.” The scenes that greeted us were nothing like those seen by Wexler or the scientists who took aerial photographs of the icefields in 1982. Instead of pristine, crystalized layers of firn that are typically left over from past winter seasons, we found an atrophying glacial surface darkened by sand and dirt. In several places, we came across the frozen carcasses and bones of caribou and wolverines that had fallen into crevasses decades or even centuries earlier and had melted out of the disappearing ice.
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