Into the ice: an alpine adventure

The route to the Ice Cave at the snout of the Paradise Glacier: scene of an alpine adventure

I grew up in the south-west of Western Australia where our climate is classified as “Mediterranean”.  This means a cycle of hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. No snow, and the only ice is an occasional mild overnight frost in inland areas.  Also, no mountains in WA either, at least none that might get to be snow-capped for most of the year. I was 18 before I saw snow for the first time (on an intervarsity football trip to Tasmania), and I have never seen sea ice, a Polar bear, a penguin or an iceberg.

But I have seen a glacier, indeed I have been inside one. This is the story of that unlikely experience.

To tell this story, once again I return to that miraculous time of discovery and exploration in the mid-1960s when I was a graduate student at the University of Washington, newly married, and living in Seattle in the USA.

The Pacific North-west, which comprises the states of Washington and Oregon, has a climate of extremes. There are the coastal areas facing the Pacific Ocean which have high rainfall, but relatively mild temperatures - grey drizzly days are common, snow is rare. Then there are the inland regions, east of the mountains, which are relatively dry, but can be bitterly cold and are often snow-bound in winter. In between, the Cascade and Olympic Mountains reach up above the tree line and the peaks are snowed in throughout winter and spring. Dotted along the main ridgeline of the Cascades are a series of outstanding peaks, sleeping volcanoes, which rise to over 4000 m (>14,000 feet). The tallest of these, Mt Ranier has a height of 4,500 m and has twenty-eight named glaciers on its flanks [Footnote 1].

Mt Ranier towers over the surrounding countryside and the Cascade Range

In the summer of 1966, Ellen and I lived for some months at Pack Forest, the University’s experimental forest in the foothills of the Cascades.  Wherever we went, Mt Ranier seemed to loom over us, a towering white mass, snow-shrouded or cloud-cloaked throughout the year. It represented everything that was different about our environment in the US compared to that back home in Western Australia.

Mt Ranier’s glaciers were especially fascinating, as was the way they (or at least two of them) became part of my education. During my summer at Pack Forest I spent part of the time as the teaching assistant to my Professor, the famous David R M Scott. The forestry undergraduates were in camp, and I helped Dr Scott with classes, assignments and field work, although it has to be said that my role was mostly administrative and indeed, I was more of a student than a teacher. Not that I minded, because the field trips into the surrounding forests were always of great interest. One of these was especially memorable – a study of the evolution of north-west forests in the wake of the last Ice Age.

As is well-known, the whole of Canada and most of north America was covered in ice during the last Ice Age. This ended perhaps 25,000 years ago. As the earth slowly warmed during succeeding centuries, the ice retreated.  In modern times it remains only in the Polar regions, and in the great glaciers on the flanks of the highest mountains. Although there have been fluctuations of advance and retreat, overall, the world’s great glaciers are gradually melting, retreating to higher and colder elevations.

Dr Scott gave us a wonderful insight into these processes on one of his field trips. This took us to the nearby Nisqually Valley (if I remember its name correctly). This was a steep, U-shaped valley that had, long ago, been carved out of the rock by an advancing glacier. The glacier was now gone, but you could trace its retreat up the valley by studying the different vegetation types that had evolved in its wake. As Dr Scott demonstrated, the most mature vegetation type was at the bottom of the valley, old-growth Douglas-fir forest. As we mounted mile by mile up towards the summit of the valley, the vegetation gradually changed, each different type demonstrating a younger phase in the post-glacial succession. At the top, where the glacier had finally melted away, there was nothing but bare rocky rubble. Here and there we discovered the first pioneer plants (mosses and lichens) starting to get a foothold, and caught glimpses of the alpine marmot, a little squirrel-like animal that feeds on the moss. The marmot’s droppings became the first soils into which the first seeds of the first hardy shrubs were brought by birds or the wind, starting the whole process of succession.  Nobody, not even Dr Scott, could say what the time-frame was over which revegetation of the Nusqually Valley had occurred, and was still occurring, but it was clearly a long time – the forests at the foot of the valley were hundreds of years old and were self-sustaining.

Mature Douglas-fir forest

And there was another layer of complexity: the impact of elevation. Dr Scott had a neat ecological formula that explained all this. I have forgotten the details, but it was along the lines of “every hundred feet in elevation is equivalent to a hundred miles in latitude”. This meant that as well as retracing the footsteps of a melting glacier up a mountain valley, we were also “travelling north”, and by the time we reached the peak of the valley, we were somewhere in Canada, in terms of latitude.

All in all, one of the most educational days in my life.

Later, I was chatting with Dr Scott, and the subject of glaciers came up. “You can walk into one, y’know  Raaj” he said casually in his Texas drawl, as he rolled a cigarette one-handed, cowboy-style … and this was how I first heard of the Ice Caves at the snout of the Paradise Glacier on Mt Ranier. Hearing was almost immediately followed by exploration, on a sunny day a week or two hence.

The Cascade Mountains in mid-summer are very beautiful, and our walk that day gave us the opportunity to savour its beauties. Leaving the carpark at the foot of the trail, we wended our way up through lovely conifer forests and steep ravines, each with its rushing torrent of icy snow-melt, and rocky waterfalls. Beyond were smaller peaks, and ahead the mighty bulk of Mt Ranier.

Mounting higher, the forest began to give way to alpine meadows, colourful with daisies. The air was crisp, clear and cool, but we were warm from the exertion of the climb. Ellen was in Western Australian summer gear: shorts, sleeveless top, tennis socks and sneakers.

At least I had made a concession to our mountaineering venture: I was wearing boots:

After about 2-3 hours walking we stopped for our picnic which I carried in a rucksack. I can’t remember what was in it, but almost certainly there would have been an apple or two – Washington State grew the USA’s best apples.

By then we were almost at the tree line and began to encounter patches of snow and small icy tarns, each with a lovely reflection of the surrounding peaks. The trail was marked, and signs warned us to keep on it.

Then, a point was reached as we plodded across a wide snow field, glittering in the bright sunlight, and made our way cautiously over a raft of barren rock scree, when suddenly up ahead we spotted the glacier, and the dark hole at it’s snout. This was the entry to our destination, the Paradise Ice Caves.

Our first glimpse of the Ice Cave at the foot of the Paradise Glacier, seen from perhaps a kilometre away

In another half an hour or so, we were at the cave.  From its mouth, a strongly flowing icy torrent emerged, and a curtain of ice-melt showered down from above. Glacial melting was going on before our very eyes!

It was rough underfoot, threatening a tumble into the icy stream (we had been too inexperienced to carry walking staves) but we were able to enter the cave, move cautiously upstream, and explore. Despite a niggle of apprehension (I suffer from claustrophobia, Ellen from responsibility, and both of us from over-active imaginations), we made it up inside the glacier for about 50 metres. It was quite light, as an eerie glow filtered through the ice above us, giving it a strange blue tinge.

Inside the ice, blue light filtering through

The cave seemed to extend back a long way, but it was mysterious and bitterly cold in there, and to be honest, neither of us liked it.  What if there was a sudden collapse, if the glacier calved? The thought crossed my mind that there was not a soul in the world who knew where we were at that moment, and had we been entombed, we would simply have disappeared.

With these thoughts in mind, we scrambled back to the cave entry and standing there saw a wonderful sight. Way off to the south was Mt St Helens, another of the great peaks of the Cascades [Footnote 2].

Mt St Helens is just discernible way off on the horizonn to the left of the twin peaks. Across to the right you can see the  trail on which we came in, across a snow field.

The day ended as it had begun, with a long walk (it was about a 20 km round trip), but this time downhill. As we walked the landscape began progressively to bloom, leaving behind the sterile rock scree and glittering, barren snowfields, walking through flowering meadows and at last into the welcome embrace of the forest.

Back in Seattle I followed up on the subject of Ice Ages and glaciers, reading books and chatting to colleagues about the alpine environment and post-glacial vegetation succession. Nobody talked about “global warming” in those days – the term simply did not exist. It was just accepted that the slow warming of the earth since the last Ice Age was resulting in the retreat of the glaciers, and that this had been going on for centuries. Moreover, in the case of glaciers on mountains with active volcanoes like Mt Ranier, internally-generated heat was also contributing to ice melt. Geologists I talked to, or whose papers I read, were uniformly confident that at some future time the situation would be reversed, some sort of planetary cycle slowly revolving. Indeed, “global cooling” was actually seen as a threat back then.

The Ice Cave at the snout of the Paradise Glacier is no longer there. The glacier continued its inexorable retreat, and the caves disappeared sometime in the 1990s when the snout collapsed. There are still ice caves within the craters at the summit of the mountain, formed by volcanic heat, but only the foolhardiest would ever explore them.

Three things stick in my mind about that expedition Ellen and I made to the Ice Caves of Mt Ranier in 1966. The first was the opportunity to observe and understand one of the fundamental processes of geological history: the cycle of advance and retreat of the ice.

The second is how only a few hours in a barren, black and white, and sterile environment of ice, snow and rock reinforced the fact that I am a lowland woodsman, a man of the trees, not of the mountains or the Poles.

The third is my retrospective astonishment about how fit and intrepid we were back in the day, all those years ago. It makes me tired and anxious  just to think about it.

 Footnotes

1.   Mt Ranier was named by George Vancouver in 1792, after a British Admiral. This is the same George Vancouver who, only a year earlier, visited and charted the south coast of Western Australia, was one of the first Europeans to sail into King George Sound (now Albany) and who proclaimed the south-west part of Australia as British territory.

There are several native American names for Mt Ranier, the most common being Tahoma.

2.  This is an historic picture of Mt St Helens. Fifteen years later (in 1980) it erupted, and the whole top of the mountain was blown away. Mt Ranier is also an active volcano. There was a major eruption about 500 years ago, and numerous minor eruptions since, the most recent being in 1873.

Afterword

I cannot leave the subject of ice caves without including the most famous ice cave photograph of them all (I discovered it in Stephen Pyne’s magnificent book The Ice). This was taken by Herbert Ponting, the photographer on Captain Robert Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica in 1913. Shot from within an ice cave, it shows members of the expedition and the Terra Nova herself, framed by icicles.

It is a photograph that sums up Antarctica to me – I am fascinated by it, but don’t want to go there. After all, when it comes to ice caves, I have (as the saying goes) been there and done that ….