Notes from the Top

Climbing and Science

Climbing and glaciology – the science of studying glaciers – have long tied in together.

When the Alpine Club of Canada ran its first mountaineering camp in Yoho National Park 1906, on days between ascents of the area’s big, glaciated peaks, several participants hiked to the toe of Yoho Glacier. There they placed a row of metal plates across the ice tongue to mark its rate of flow, along with rocks in a row to mark its advance or retreat. Arthur O. Wheeler, a surveyor by trade who co-founded the acc, continued recording measurements of that Rockies glacier for many years afterward.

In 1922 American mountaineer J. Monroe Thorington, an ophthalmologist better known for his 52 first ascents in the Canadian Rockies and BC’S mountain ranges, began two decades of studying Lyell and Freshfield glaciers. In 1933 he set up three separate camera stations overlooking Peyto Glacier marking a prominent rock at each site with white paint and continued to photograph the glacier from those sites for many years following. Marking the first scientific studies on that glacier, which he reported in the Canadian Alpine Journal, his work contributed to making Peyto the most continuously studied glacier in North America.

Climbers, and especially mountain guides who climb the same peaks repeatedly over the years, often over careers that span decades, can’t help but notice changes in the glaciers they cross to access familiar summits.

For Canmore-based Yamnuska Mountain Adventures, the Rockies’ Columbia Icefield region represents one of the company’s premier guiding areas where rarely a summer week passes without guides leading clients up Mounts Athabasca, Andromeda, Boundary Peak and occasionally Columbia. And while those guides aren’t making any formal scientific measurements in the field, they can’t ignore how their workplace changes drastically, even from year to year. On Athabasca, they are intimately aware of places where glacial recession has caused rockfall to increase, where slopes have steepened, and sections that melt to bare ice earlier in the season than in past years make kicking steps more difficult.

“I’ve seen huge changes,” said acmg mountain guide Barry Blanchard. “Places we used to go in the 1980s that were fantastic places to teach vertical ice climbing – they’re gone now. That area used to be hundreds and hundreds of metres of ice; it’s just gone. Not there anymore. Some great pictures taken of us in crevasses in 1993 – now it’s bedrock.”

Having grown up and first learned to climb frozen waterfalls in the Canadian Rockies, pro ice climber Will Gadd’s ties to the range and its glaciers runs deep. In December 2016 he explored to new depths when he teamed up with University of Alberta glaciologist (since retired) Dr. Martin Sharp for an exploratory project that turned into an exciting and entirely new discovery for science.

Locating a millwell a friend had marked with his gps the previous summer, Gadd and Sharp – who for years has studied how water moves along and underneath glaciers through self-generated drainage systems – visited the site in winter. In -37 C they dug through snow to locate the entrance, then built ice climbing anchors in the glacier surface and lowered themselves into the vertical shaft. As they dropped deeper inside the cavern, they encountered warm air rising from the depths – a stark contrast to the frigid temperatures outside on the surface.

Inside, their thermometers registered the air temperature at a comfortable -1 C– just cold enough to keep the ice frozen. All around them smooth ice walls were curved and bowed, testimony to the natural sculpting power of the glacial meltwater that plunges and swirls down the sluice during the summer months. Once they’d descended 100 vertical metres, they stood tall and walked along horizontal passages that had been bored by the forceful flow.

“We went from this incredibly harsh world on the surface to this amazing place down there,” Gadd described. “It was amazing blue light for about the first 30 metres, then it got dark. At 50 metres a headlamp was essential. This was real exploration – there’s no map, no idea what’s down there.”

And what they found down there, about

50 metres down, surprised them all. Two distinct colonies of biofilms were living on the ice walls, one red algae, and one green. A biofilm is a group of micro-organisms that stick to each other and together adhere to a surface – like the plaque on our teeth, which is a biofilm. They didn’t expect to see insects flying around inside the glacier either, but they did. Equally fascinating were the pools of water they discovered deep under the ice in the dead of winter.

Following their adventure, which included participants from the Canada Science and Technology Museum and a Discovery Canada film crew, Sharp investigated to see if there was any existing information about the organisms they’d discovered. He couldn’t find a single record.

While the team had hoped to penetrate all the way to the bed surface – the interface where the ice connects with the ground that supports it – they stopped and headed back up. The ice walls were creaking and groaning under the intense pressure of their own weight, and that force was causing them to crack. Later the team determined they were between 20 and

60 metres in much greater loss of ice volume than the easily viewed and measured horizontal recession.

Having lived much of his life in the Canadian Rockies, with his first visits to the Athabasca Glacier happening when he was a young boy more than 40 years earlier, Gadd said he is continually amazed by the rapid pace at which the Athabasca is melting due to climate change. And now, having explored deep inside the ice, his perspective has expanded.

“Whenever I’m travelling on glaciers to climb or ski, I’ve always looked down into millwells and wondered what’s going on down there,” Gadd said. “Now when I drive by the Athabasca Glacier, I don’t see just this chunk of ice. There’s this whole world going on down there.”

Lynn Martel is a mountain writer and climber who has called the Canadian Rockies home for more than 30 years. Read more about Canada’s glaciers and the adventurers who explore them in her book, Stories of Ice:adventure, Commerce

and Creativity on Canada’s Glaciers.