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Feature - A day in the life of a glacier

A recreation resource and a source of life, our glaciers are changing – rapidly

If you were as patient as a Zen monk, a time-lapse camera operator, you could defy convention and watch a kettle boil, witness sunflower heads follow the arc of the sun. You could even watch glaciers move.

A glacier is a field of moving ice. Under the weight of masses of accumulated snow, snowflakes "compact" into ice. Once the snowfield morphs into a thick ice field, it begins to slowly move, like thick molasses. It creeps. Moving under its own weight, or inching on its own meltwater.

The coastal precipitation that sustains us, as skiers and riders, also sustains the glaciers in the Coast Range. In a climate that sees an average of five metres of snowfall each winter, the ice-fields are given the kiss of life every six months.

It takes patience to make sense of the glacial dance, to have a cryptic conversation with a glacier. Glaciers keep their secrets deep, but ice core drilling enables us to take samples and puzzle out climates gone before us. From ice that is a remnant of the Ice Age, between 1 to 2 million and 10,000-years-old. A human life, a human day, feels incredibly short. No matter how patient we are, we can only imagine the glacier’s life span. And what of our human lives does the glacier witness?

John Baldwin writes in Mountains of the Coast : "Roughly three times the size of the Sierra Nevada or the European Alps, the Coast Mountains sees fewer climbers in an entire year than the Alps or the Sierras do in a busy weekend."

The Horstman Glacier on Blackcomb is a different story. Accessible by chairlift for $42 a pass, it sees more human traffic in a summer than large tracts of the province. Perhaps the word the glacier would attach to us, if it were observing, would be defiant .

We start at the surface, defying the natural topography of things, in grooming cats on revolving treads. At the beginning of each summer season, the cats are out in force, hired out by the summer camps to create terrain parks and fantasy lands of hits and berms, pipes and moguls. Installing rails. Pushing the 20 feet of winter surface snow that covers the glacier into super-sized piles from which to sculpt jumps. Forty-five acres of playground. For 18 camps and an indefinite number of public recreationalists who can’t wait until next winter for their fix. Defying the season, the golfing imperative, by strapping on board/s in the middle of July.

The camps run the entire gamut of summer alpine fantasies – alpine ski racing, skiercross, freestyle, moguls, snowboard, freeride, new school. Like everyone else in the business of selling fantasy, the summer camps have been hit by the Sept. 11, 2001 ripple effect. The ripples become rogue waves, tsunamis. Insurance costs have tripled and camps are joining forces, merging, amalgamating under parent entities. Bookings, despite initial interest, were hammered by SARS, Iraq II, the increasing muscle of the Canadian dollar.

Regardless, in defiance of all these hurdles, the glacier will still be busy.

By 8 a.m., sandal-clad feet are flip-flopping to the base of Blackcomb. Lift-tickets are collected, feet strapped into boots, and the Wizard Express launches them skyward. They continue up Solar, engage in some aerial bear-spotting, then line up for the diesel chokedown of old school buses lurching along the road to 7th Heaven. One quad chair to go, and there you are. The Horstman Glacier. Summer skiing. From the first week in June until the first week in August.

The Horstman Glacier is divided into lanes. Camp operators lease lanes from the mountain, wherein they construct their own features. The Dave Murray Summer Ski and Snowboard Camp, the oldest camp in operation, has a full size halfpipe, full beginner line with five jumps, an expert line with five jumps and a jibbing line with rails. Whistler-Blackcomb reserves public lanes which open to the public from 10 a.m. (11 a.m. after June 19). The lanes are in such high demand that, if the glacier were bigger, the spaces could certainly be accounted for, according to W-B’s Public Relations Officer Christopher Nicolson.

"The glacier has seen tremendous growth and there’s been a lot of interest, a lot of demand for camps," says Nicolson. "If we had more space, we could rent out even more. But peak season is totally spoken for. The only other place with summer skiing is Mt Hood. So we have leading edge athletes coming here, to coach, to film. The concentration of elite athletes on the glacier is really good exposure for Whistler."

Whistler has a stable of elite athletes, practising and retired. Stephanie Sloan, director of Women on the Edge ski programs and former operator of the Dave Murray Summer Camp, has spent her fair share of time in ski boots. With her late husband, Dave Murray, she coached in Whistler Mountain’s Toni Sailer camps in the early ’80s. The Toni Sailer camps had been running on Whistler’s Glacier Bowl, where The Saddle has since been blasted, since its earliest days. The camp’s coaches included Nancy Greene Raine, Patrick Russell, Wayne Wong and Toni Sailer. Back then, the camp was only two lanes wide, the staff would have to install the surface lift themselves and the campers would sometimes overnight on the mountain, in the Roundhouse. After retiring from the race circuit, Murray and Sloan went into partnership with Whistler in 1984, and the camp became the Dave Murray Summer Camp, which they ran together until Dave’s death in 1990.

"After the merger (of Whistler and Blackcomb)," Stephanie recalls, "the Horstman Glacier was opened. Our little glacier on Whistler was evidently not going to compete, and they didn’t want to be running two summer glaciers, so we moved over to Blackcomb. The summer camps were race oriented, but people also came for freestyle and ballet, wanting to learn tricks. We weren’t initially a snowboard camp, so when snowboarding started, we lost a few numbers, until we incorporated snowboarding."

"The recession of the glacier would really depend on the year. If we’d had a good winter, it wasn’t that obvious to me that the ice was coming up. But I remember being up there sometimes and seeing rivulets appear, full of cracks and rocks."

Stephanie Sloan doesn’t ski much in the summer anymore. But, in the one way humans defy time, her daughter will be there this summer, training on the Horstman Glacier with the Whistler Mountain Ski Club.

The major challenge for the summer camps to contend with is the melt. The glaciers on Whistler and Blackcomb are temperate – their temperatures, outside of winter, are close to melting. For the diggers, who work on the glacier for various camps managing the features and the snow on the lanes, the game is preservation. Keep the snow going as long as possible. Whistler-Blackcomb provides two truckloads of salt annually, and the camps buy 50-pound bags. Armed with shovels and salt bags, the diggers defy the inevitable.

Slowly, the jumps and features melt over the summer, as does the winter snow on the glacier surface, and by summer skiing seasons’ end, there are patches of glacier everywhere. Riders avoid the black and blue patches of exposed rock, dust and ice. The basic rule of thumb: aim for the white stuff.

But, the evidence from the scientific community points to one thing. We’re fighting a losing battle. Trying to defy global warming.

Glaciers are not just a resource for aficionados of snowsports. They are a primary source of water for hydration, sanitation, irrigation, hydropower, fishing. And they are melting. The evidence is indisputable, and the retreat has been significant over the last 150 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age, around 1850. According to the World Resources Institute, the world’s total glacier mass decreased by about 12 per cent over the century. The Helm Glacier, behind Black Tusk, has retreated more than a kilometre in that period. In the last 30 years alone, Wedgemount Glacier has retreated hundreds of metres. It is 700 metres up the valley from its 1951 position. Data collected every September by local geologist, Karl Ricker, and other volunteers, pegs the average rate of recession of Wedgemount at 12.6 metres annually. Overlord Glacier is retreating at an average of nine metres a year.

A big winter may fuel the growth of a glacier, provided the ice can override the old moraines, but temperature ultimately has more impact on glaciers than precipitation. Which is a technical way of saying that a warm summer after a good winter is the equivalent of one step forward, two steps back – a warm summer can melt gains from more than one previous year. The feeling of most scientists is that warmer temperatures associated with climate change are the cause of world-wide glacial melting .

In spite of what Alberta might argue, this is a global concern, because mountains are the water towers of the world. The primary source of the world’s water. Rivers are born in the mountains. Water, frozen or freeflowing, is abundant in Canada, but that doesn’t give us carte blanche.

The wars of the 21 st century, once we get over our oil fetish, are going to be fought over a liquid far more precious than the black stuff. Canada is the third most highly glaciated country in the world, after Greenland and Antarctica. Closer to home, the Coast Mountains are one of the most heavily glaciated ranges on earth.

Recent studies from Environment Canada say: "warming trends caused by climate change could have a dramatic effect on these regions. If atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases continue to rise, experts say global average temperatures may increase 3-5 degrees Celsius. In snow-covered mountainous regions, warmer temperatures may melt snow, reduce the reflective snow cover, and allow more solar energy to be absorbed by the earth's surface. As surface temperatures heat up, they will cause even more melting and, consequently, even warmer surface temperatures – a circular chain of events known as ‘positive feedback.’

"This cycle could have a dramatic effect in mountainous regions of British Columbia. Higher temperatures and less snow could upset sensitive ecosystems, allowing trees and other vegetation to invade open areas that are essential habitat for certain species of wildlife, and could leave some ski areas in the Rockies and Southern B.C. without enough snow to operate. They could also have a significant negative impact on water resources, which rely heavily on snow melt, particularly in the mid- to late summer. Domestic water supplies could be hit hard, as could migrating salmon if water temperatures become too warm."

Glacial meltwater is what fills our drink bottles. The Cheakamus River, Pemberton Creek, Slesse Creek, Homathko River, Lillooet River, and Squamish River are all glacier-fed, their flow peaking in early or mid-summer. Blackcomb and Horstman Glaciers melt into Blackcomb Creek, one of the sources of Whistler’s drinking water, along with Rainbow Glacier and numerous wells. Almost all of Whistler’s late-summer water is glacial melt.

In the short-term, glacial melt will increase the volume of these rivers. Over the longer term the volume of glacier-fed streams and rivers will suffer a reduction.

The summer is finally here, and I’m happy to put my boards away and pull out the mountain bike, hiking boots, climbing rack. Return from a day of play, run cold water from the tap and slug back several glasses in huge gulps. No trips to the well needed. Cool mountain water at the turn of a tap. What the body needs; cannot survive without.

This year – 2003 – is the International Year of Freshwater. Nearly half the planet suffers from water scarcity, insecurity or shortage. The glaciers are melting. The river is running. A convoy of SUVs make their growly pilgrimage back down from the mountain along the exploding Sea to Sky. I guess they figure that they’ll be able to out-pace it.



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