Washington's Disappearing Glaciers

Forced Retreat

Washington’s glaciers are disappearing and taking pieces of the state’s identity with them

written by Daniel O'Neil

IN LATE SUMMER of 2021, mountaineer and geoscientist John All led a group of college students to Mount Baker’s 10,780-foot peak. He had first climbed the mountain in the late 1990s, when the glaciers lay entire and unyielding underfoot. Now, pre-dawn and just below the summit, All and his group found meltwater running through the ice and covering their boots.

We were almost wading through the melting glacier at 4 a.m.,” All said. On the descent, he pointed out the Swiss cheese-like surface of the surrounding glacier, caused by meltwater devouring the ice. Mount Baker no longer resembled the glaciated peak All had climbed a few decades before. “The changes were mind-boggling.”

In the lower forty-eight, Washington is the glacier state. From Mount Saint Helens to Mount Baker and the North Cascades, and throughout the Olympic Range, Washington hosts more than 800 flowing glaciers. But these—and every other glacier on the planet—now face extinction as the century, and climate warming, steam forward. The consequences will reshape not just Washington’s mountains but, more crucially, its rivers, salmon and cultures.

In the lower forty-eight, Washington is the glacier state. From Mount Saint Helens to Mount Baker and the North Cascades, and throughout the Olympic Range, Washington hosts more than 800 flowing glaciers.

EVER SINCE the Quaternary Ice Age, which began more than two million years ago, glaciers have capped Washington’s peaks. Four decades should amount to little for a glacier, but Washington’s glaciers have been in decline since the early 1980s. Glaciologist Jon Riedel, former park geologist for North Cascades National Park, has visited and revisited perennial ice and snowfields in Washington since then. His rucksack brims with examples of glacial retreat.

Take, for instance, Noisy Glacier in the North Cascades. “It’s the headwaters of Noisy Creek, but it’s become kind of a silent glacier because it’s stagnating,” Riedel said. “A few years ago, I noticed rocks on the glacier and thought it was a little landslide rockfall, so I went over to it and realized the glacier was getting so thin the bedrock was starting to poke up from underneath. It’s a staggering amount of ice that’s been lost there.”

Across the state, at different paces, glaciers are receding as the climate warms. Summer temperatures melt off more ice and snow than the glaciers can store in winter, even at high elevation. On top of this, in the lower-elevation ranges nearest the Pacific Ocean, like the Olympics and North Cascades, rain is replacing snow as freezing levels rise. Glaciers on the arid east side of the Cascade crest now receive less snowfall in winter and more intense heat in summer, a twofold blow.

According to Andrew Fountain, a professor emeritus of geology and geography at Portland State University, who has studied Washington’s glaciers extensively, Washingtonians ought to worry about the threat to water supplies. But not for the reason they might expect.

“Glaciers in the Northwest are kind of small, and they don’t really affect many people,” Fountain said. “We get plenty of rainfall and our snowpacks persist late into July. The issue is that glaciers provide waterflow during the hottest, driest parts of our summer, in August and September. They feed high alpine ecosystems and, to some degree, the lower elevation landscapes during this period. So if glaciers were to shrink dramatically, as they are shrinking, or if they disappear, a lot of these areas become more vulnerable to drought and the subsequent stresses put on the system because of that drought.”

Glacial retreat can complicate projects like irrigation, hydropower and even recreation. It can lead to dangers like debris flows and flooding. But the real victims, besides the glaciers themselves, are the salmon, steelhead and other fish like bull trout that depend on the steady, cool, late-summer streamflows that only glaciers can provide. Scientists admit that glaciers won’t offer this lifeline for long.

Since around 1900, the North Cascades and Olympics have lost slightly more than half of their glacial area. Mount Rainier has lost almost a quarter. The timing of impending glacial retreat, determined by complex computational modeling, depends on factors like topography and greenhouse gas emissions. Erkan Istanbulluoglu, a professor of hydrology at the University of Washington, does not sugarcoat the models’ conclusions.

“We’re in a rapid decline phase no matter which emissions scenario you’re using,” he said. “Between 2020 and 2040, we might see 60 to 80 percent of the glacial area we had in the 1960s in most glaciers in Washington.” After that, glacial retreat and disappearance accelerate rapidly as there becomes less ice to melt. By the end of the century, only the highest, most sun-sheltered areas of the Cascade volcanoes will retain perennial ice. All of this equates to severe reductions in late summer streamflow.

“By 2020 to 2040, the peak flow of glacial melt contribution will have passed in all rivers except for high-elevation watersheds,” Istanbulluoglu said. Toward the century’s end, models forecast latesummer meltwater volumes to shrink by up to 80 percent in low-elevation basins also plagued by decreasing snowfall.

“In some high-elevation catchments we might get some support of glacial flow, until the glaciers melt in the 2060s. It will hit hard everywhere by then, regardless of elevation.”

Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier. Since around 1900, Mount Rainier has lost almost a quarter of its glacial area.

THE NEW YEAR for the Hoh Tribe, on the western edge of the Olympic Peninsula, begins in spring when the salmon return from the Pacific Ocean to spawn in the Hoh River and its tributaries. The Hoh, like many other Pacific Northwest tribes, honor the first-caught salmon with a ceremony rich in salmon-rejoicing song and dance.

“We call them the Salmon People, you know, because we’re related,” said Hoh tribal council member Bryan Cole. “If you’ve ever looked at their scales up close, they resemble a human fingerprint. We rely on them to survive, and the eagles do as well.”

Salmon in Washington are as iconic and indispensable as the mountain peaks that give rise to the state’s many salmonbearing rivers and streams. Cultures, industries and communities, both human and wild, rely on the fat, silvery fish. Other than the glaciers themselves, nothing stands to lose more from glacial retreat than salmon.

Glaciers affect salmon in several subtle ways. As most of Washington’s rivers receive the bulk of their water from rainfall and snowmelt, they will not go dry after the glaciers have gone. But during August and September, glaciers feed a steady, critical supply of cold water to salmon and other riverine life, especially in the driest summers.

Hydrologist Chris Frans, who works for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, likens this glacial summer flow to water towers. “They give us water at the time of year when there’s very little,” Frans said. “And these water towers will start to run dry as the climate warms.”

According to Frans, the Hoh River streamflow gauging station, in operation since the 1960s, has already recorded strong declines in annual minimum flow. “The strongest decline in monthly flow volume is in August, the month with the strongest glacier melt signature,” he said. “Declining glaciers are likely a contributor, in addition to earlier snowmelt timing.”

Glacial runoff matters most in a river’s upstream reaches, where it can provide up to half of the water or more, depending on location. In years with limited snowmelt, relative glacier contributions can rise to 90 percent. Certain runs of Chinook salmon and steelhead trout have evolved in line with these chilled summer flows, which prove critical for all phases of their freshwater lifecycle. Bull trout, in particular, only live where glacial melt keeps the river cold.

Kathryn Sutton, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife fish biologist, keeps a trained eye on the Hoh River. The summer runs of salmon and steelhead are vulnerable, she said. “They come into the river earlier, hold for longer, go higher in the watershed and will be more sensitive to warmer water and lower flows.”

Without “water towers” in late summer, streams run shallow. This reduces habitat for spawning and rearing salmonids, or forces females to lay eggs where eventual high water washes them away. Shallow water flows warmer, under already hotter summer air, which stresses the salmon and depresses their survival rate. Even insects, food for juveniles and adults waiting to spawn, have temperature thresholds. Diminished glacial meltwater only exacerbates all of this.

An absence of glacial ice also reveals new sediment and soil that can slide into upstream waters. Wild salmon and steelhead bury their eggs under riverbed gravel in what biologists call redds. Sediment can smother these redds, depriving the embryo of oxygen-rich water. The insects that provide food for salmon also suffer under high sediment loads. This becomes significant in hot, arid regions, like east of Mount Adams.

“We’ve noticed just anecdotally in the last few years an increase in the number of days when we see high sediment levels coming down some of the tributary streams off Mount Adams,” Joe Zendt, a Yakama Nation fisheries biologist, said of the Klickitat River. “It really seems to be occurring during the prime spring Chinook spawning time more in recent years.”

A knock-on effect of glacial melt is a suffocation of salmon eggs.

AS GLACIAL RUNOFF dwindles, salmon and humans will have to share what’s left. While salmon face greater challenges from the loss of glaciers, some of Washington’s infrastructure and recreation will also feel the impact. Municipal water supplies depend more on snowmelt, so drinking water is safe. But in certain parts of the state, hydropower dams like the Baker Dam below Mount Baker and the Alder Dam on the Nisqually River will receive less water in summer. Streamflows that feed some irrigation in Washington have already begun to shrivel.

The Skagit Valley lies in the North Cascades, the most glaciated area in the contiguous United States. It is also Puget Sound’s largest watershed. But low elevations and small glaciers here prove susceptible to a warming climate. Since the late 1950s, the watershed has lost an amount of ice equal to a century of current Skagit County fresh water demand.

Jon Riedel lives in the Skagit Valley, and he chairs the Skagit Climate Science Consortium, a research group. “We’re one of the wettest, most glaciated valleys, and we’re already stressed for summer flows,” he said. “The lower Skagit Valley is a huge agricultural valley, but it’s really dry because it’s in the rain shadow of the Olympics, so there’s a ton of irrigation going on. Even though only 6 to 12 percent of the summer water in rivers is glacial, that’s a lot to lose.”

Thunder Creek rushes right out of the North Cascades and into the Diablo Reservoir, just above the Skagit Valley. Diablo and Ross Lake, just upstream, form part of Seattle City Light’s Skagit River Hydroelectric Project. Power, irrigation and power boats all make use of the water.

“Streamflow patterns in highly glacierized river basins are going to change greatly as the glaciers disappear,” Frans said. “If you had less inflow during summer, you’d have less flexibility in meeting the reservoir’s multiple objectives.”

Sediment from glacial retreat threatens more than just salmon. As glaciers recede rapidly they leave behind huge fields of rubble: sand, gravel, boulders. Rains and slides carry this rocky material into rivers and streams. When that sediment deposits in the lowland valleys, it chokes the river channels, leading to flooding.

The Cascade Range volcanoes pose a larger-scale threat. Massive rock piles at the lower end of glaciers, called moraines, lose support as the ice fades away, and heavy rains force them downslope. These debris flows occur in remote landscapes, so only occasional roads or unlucky campers would be affected.

Another landscape change will follow the glaciers as they move up the mountain. Forests will occupy lands formerly under ice, extending the subalpine zone. Flora and fauna will happily occupy these new woods, as will hikers. But recreation in Washington has more to lose from glacial retreat than it has to gain.

For example, boat docks and ramps become inaccessible when reservoirs drop too much in summer. More importantly, if glacial sediment or reduced streamflows impact wild salmon and steelhead runs, deepening their current decline, WDFW might restrict or close sport fisheries of hatchery fish.

In arid regions like the Klickitat River basin, receding glaciers leave the water so murky after heat waves that poor visibility prevents the fish from seeing a lure or bait. “Sediment can directly impact good fishing days,” Zendt said. “And it seems to be happening more.”

Glaciers matter little to skiers and snowboarders, but mountaineers wouldn’t exist without them. John All is the executive director of the American Climber Science Program. He has summited many of Washington’s peaks since the 1990s and has guided groups to the top of Mount Everest and throughout the Andes. Recently, under a searing sun, All climbed Denali in shorts and a T-shirt. Even Mount Rainier, 14,410 feet high, has changed in the last two decades. All’s new main concern there is dehydration.

“It’s so much hotter now than it used to be,” he said. “I went back to Rainier last summer, hadn’t done it in ten years, and I was utterly astonished. It was unrecognizable from when I’d climbed it before. Now, on big chunks of the summit, there’s no snow.”

In summer, Rainier’s thinning glaciers have begun to undulate, following the landscape features below. The short, steep sections that have appeared can seriously complicate climbing. In winter, more freeze-thaw cycles have increased avalanche risk. In the alpine, the unknown holds the greatest dangers.

“When you see experts having accidents, it’s usually just something they’d never experienced in the 300 times they’d been in that spot before,” All said. “And now, all of a sudden, that place was full of ice water and they plunged into the crevasse or whatever.”

Disappearing glaciers have made mountaineering easier in other ways. “It’s better to camp on dirt than on snow or ice,” All said. “And the glaciers have moved higher up so you can go higher before you have to put on crampons.”

As the glaciers melt, mountaineers must adapt by redefining themselves. “The ice isn’t going to be climbable, isn’t going to exist in the future,” All said. “So yeah, we’re all going to become crumbly rock climbers one day.”

THE CONSEQUENCES of glacial retreat will touch all of society, but particularly those who find a deeper connection with the mountains, like glaciologists and climbers. “For me personally it’s an incredible tragedy, like watching people dying—it’s things I love dying,” All said. “This one is poignant because glaciers are beautiful, beautiful things and they just aren’t going to exist anymore. There might be chunks of ice scattered here and there that haven’t quite melted, but that’s not a glacier.”

For me personally it’s an incredible tragedy, like watching people dying—it’s things I love dying. This one is poignant because glaciers are beautiful, beautiful things and they just aren’t going to exist anymore. There might be chunks of ice scattered here and there that haven’t quite melted, but that’s not a glacier.

The latest computer modeling shows an inexorable decline of glaciers in Washington over the course of this century. Uncertainty remains over precise dates and rates of decline, but by 2100 most of the smaller glaciers on the lower non-volcanic mountains will have disappeared. Some ice will cling to the colder zones on the highest peaks, yet by 2070 the Olympic Range glaciers will be gone.

Climate change requires adaptation from all life on Earth. A warming planet brings to light the interconnections between humans and the natural world. “The salmon are vital to our people, but not only to our people—they’re valuable to our ecosystem,” Cole said. “When these runs start to dwindle, all the other animals that depended on them, their numbers are going to start to drop as well.”

Pacific salmon are a keystone species to at least 137 other animals, including caddisflies, orcas and coyotes, and the nutrients they bring from the ocean nourish the forest. Their commercial value matters much to Washington’s economy: over $130 million each year. Fortunately, salmon and steelhead have seen melted glaciers before, having evolved over millions of years during the Miocene, an era of warmer temperatures and relatively little glacier cover.

“I hesitate to say extinction, just because salmon have so many challenges even beyond climate change and receding glaciers—harvest rates, habitat loss, land-use practices—but they still persist,” Sutton said. “I have optimism if we can preserve what habitat we still have.”

Humanity, responsible for the changes to climate that cause glacial decline, now holds the fate of other species in hand. At this point, no one can rebuild the glaciers. But nonprofits, volunteers, tribes and public agencies can, and do, protect and restore habitat for salmon and steelhead in Washington. The survival of these fish will depend on access to a wide variety of hospitable rivers and streams throughout the state. Solutions for hydropower, irrigation and recreation concerns rely on engineering and responsible water use.

Farmers, climbers, anglers, earth scientists and anyone who loves Washington’s rivers and sublime peaks will lose something along with the glaciers. For Washington, and the Pacific Northwest as a whole, glaciers might be the canary in the coal mine, an indicator species for society, culture and identity.