Finding Glaciers in the West

For many years, the Cascades didn’t have glaciers, or so said the geologists. They weren’t referring to a time long ago when the mountains were bare of ice; the men of science simply didn’t think that glaciers were here. Nor did they think there were any glaciers in the United States, outside of Alaska, at least until 1871, when geologist Clarence King declared their discovery in the mountains of the Pacific Coast. Apparently, no one had ever noticed “the existence of active glaciers” until King and his men started to look for them.

King wasn’t some random geologist; he was head of one of the U.S. Government’s four great surveys of the American West and would eventually become the first director of the United States Geological Survey. (King is an interesting person; without many of his friends/colleagues knowing, he passed as black in order to be with the woman he loved.) In 1870, he and several teams explored Mt. Shasta, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Rainier, and found glaciers on all of them. When King went public with his discoveries, newspapers from coast to coast heralded the great achievement.

Whitney Glacier, 1870, photo by Carleton Watkins, note Clarence King in center of photo, used courtesy of United States Geological Survey

Although the United States supposedly didn’t possess glaciers, a writer for the Wilmington and Delaware Register observed that “everyone has heard of the mountains and glaciers of Switzerland,” almost fifty years before King’s announcement. Throughout the nineteenth century, newspapers regularly published descriptions of the glaciers in the Alps, often travelogs by early tourists, who highlighted the sublime beauty and magnificent scenery along with tantalizing accounts of the ice and cold, daring encounters with crevasses, and mummies “ejected by the remorseful glacier.” Newspapers also published lectures by scientists, particularly Louis Agassiz, who had emigrated to the US from Switzerland and is usually credited with popularizing the idea of Ice Ages. Well-known for his eloquence, Agassiz captured the essence of the ice as a tantalizing world that brought viewers “so completely in contact with nature in her simple grandeur…that whoever enjoys this sight for the first time must preserve it amongst his most pleasant recollections.”

Living in our 21^st century world of instant access to information, I was surprised to discover that accounts of glaciers were so available and widespread in the 1800s. In my naivete, I thought that the term glacier was little known in the US, particularly because almost no one in the country lived near or even within sight of one. But judging from how often the term appears in newspapers, people were aware of glaciers and seemed fascinated by them, even if, or perhaps because, they had never seen a piece of ice bigger than a block used for cold storage. At a time when few had the ability to travel, who wouldn’t have been intrigued by landscapes mantled in sheets of ice hundreds of feet thick and miles long? I imagine that those early readers envisioned the great glaciers of Europe with a mix of excitement, trepidation, and amazement or what Percy Bysshe Shelley described as a “scene in truth of dizzying wonder.”

In the lower 48 states, the Cascades are the native home of glaciers. A 2017 study of the glaciers found that the Cascades contained about two-thirds of the total volume and area of ice in the American West. As anyone knows who lives or has visited here, you can see easily see glaciers across the region, particularly on the volcanoes. Back in the late 1800s, when King’s men made their “discoveries,” the glaciers extended far beyond what they do today, making them even more a prominent landscape feature.

Early visitors to the region though did not mention the glaciers, or at least avoided the term. To George Vancouver (1792), the mountains wore a “perpetual clothing of snow.” Writing of Mt. St. Helens, botanist William Fraser Tolmie of the Hudson’s Bay Company (1833) observed that the volcano was “invested with a pure sheet of snow,” and, Joseph Clark, of the Wilkes Expedition (1841), upon entering Puget Sound wrote of the “everlasting snow” of the Cascades.

Drawing of the perpetually clothed Mt. Rainier from Vancouver Expedition.

When Vancouver saw the Cascades, the term glacier was fairly new to the English language (the OED cites 1744 as the first use but then there’s a leap to 1777 for the next use) but by the time of Tolmie and Clark, the word had become relatively commonplace. The issue with most of the early travelers in our region was that they didn’t venture up into the mountains; they saw them from the water, where they could not distinguish ice from snow. But at least they realized that the frozen white covering of the Cascades was not seasonal and did not melt annually.

By the time of King’s incorrect proclamation, several parties had reached the Cascades’ glaciers and written about them. In 1858, Lt. August Kautz of Fort Steilacoom, a doctor, and two other soldiers from the fort attempted to summit Mt. Rainier. Walking up the Nisqually River, they encountered the face of an “immense Glacier.” “The whole thing seems to move at times. Loud reports and a crushing and grinding of rocks is often apparent,” wrote Kurtz in his journal. Eleven years later, a team led by Englishman Edmund T. Coleman—who had mountaineered on Mont Blanc—made it to the top of Mt. Baker and observed glaciers, several of which he named, though the names didn’t stick. Both of these groups were led part way up the mountains by Native guides, another indicator that white explorers, despite what they claimed, were neither the first to venture into the alpine region of the Cascades nor the first to notice how the ice sheets advanced and retreated, moved sediment, and sculpted the landscape; the new explorers had been eclipsed by about 10,000 years.

Nisqually Glacier, 1912, photo by Bill Smith, courtesy of Diane Mettler

Coleman, in particular, was not pleased by King’s 1871 announcement of discovering live glaciers. “This, with all due deference to the writer, I deny,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Oregonian, where he had encountered King’s error. Coleman also wrote to the Engineering and Mining Journal, when they published King’s story. They, in turn, chastised him, writing that if you know so much about glaciers and think it’s so important that you were first, someone as knowledgeable as you, of all people, should know that “the scientific world is not benefited by the mere barren discovery. It is the announcement and description that constitutes true service to science.” To which Coleman responded that he had written a lengthy article about the climb in Harper’s Monthly in 1869, noting that he didn’t dwell on glaciers because as a foreigner he “was not aware of their supposed non-existence” in America.

King either ignored or overlooked Coleman’s article and letters but King did take aim at another glacier observer, John Muir. While King was seeking out his glaciers, Muir was beginning his first rambles in the Sierra, found several glaciers, and made the first scientific measurements of American glaciers. In his magnum opus Systematic Geology, published in 1878, King reiterated his claim to discovering active glaciers and included a footnote to the absurdity of Muir’s glacial observations. “It is to be hoped that Mr. Muir's vagaries will not deceive geologists who are personally unacquainted with California, and that the ambitious amateur himself may divert his evident enthusiastic love of nature into a channel, if there is one, in which his attainments would save him from hopeless floundering.” But as glaciologist Andrew Fountain wrote in The Scientific Discovery of Glaciers in the American West, “Muir did the science better” and was correct in his statements.

In the last decades of the 1800s, surveyors and scientists scoured the mountains of the American West, and found, not surprisingly, at least to modern visitors, that glaciers were abundant and widespread. What they didn’t realize was that they were out in the field in the golden age of glaciers, at the tail end of the Little Ice Age (LIA). One of the coldest periods of the last 10,000 years, the LIA lasted from about 1300 to 1850. Cold winters and mild summers led to glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere to grow and spread far down valley from where they are at present. For example, when Kautz made his attempt on Mt. Rainier, he ran into the snout of the Nisqually glacier at roughly the location of the modern bridge across the river (see image above), or about two miles from its present location. Since then, the glaciers have retreated steadily except for a period in the 1960s and 1970s when a cooler and wetter climate resulted in widespread advance.

Selling ice cream by the Nisqually River bridge, nigh unto the Nisqually Glacier, 1915, courtesy National Park Service. The park was the most visited in the country with 33,000 people in 1915. I wonder how many bought ice cream.

With climate change, we are in a new regime and headed back a century and a half to King’s time, sadly not in glacial extent but in the number of active glaciers in the continental United States. Every glacier but one (the Crater Glacier in Mt. St. Helens, which was born following the 1980 eruption) has shrunk precipitiously with many disappearing completely and all forecasts predicting continued widespread loss of ice. If we project out 152 years from now, it is highly likely that people will be just as excited as during King’s time if someone reports an active glacier in the country because the only glaciers left will probably be on the high volcanoes.

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Thanks kindly to Andrew Fountain for discussions about glaciers. And, if anyone has any information about the ice cream sellers pictured above, I’d appreciate it. The NPS has only the picture with no additional info. Sorry that this one was about twice as long as usual; there was too much interesting info.