A Tourism Boom for the Wrong Reason

Last May, I was invited on an expedition Alaska’s Mount Fairweather, to try the famed Carpe Ridge, a 10,000-foot alpine route on the south side of the mountain. We flew into the Fairweather Glacier and began. Or, at least, that was the plan. As it turned out, the weather had other ideas: about ten feet of snow in about eleven days—that’s what it felt like, anyway. (We never did do the route because of the danger of avalanche.)

But, I will say, there are few finer places than the Fairweather Glacier if you’re going to sit still for 264 continuous hours. With some of the region’s prettiest mountains ringing our basecamp, and the noisy seagulls and other coastal birds squawking past, I didn’t particularly mind lolling around on a camp chair and perfecting my dining skills. But I did mind the frequent and explosive crrrrrrrrrackkks of the glaciers. All around us, gigantic turrets and slabs of ice would calve off several large glaciers on the south side of Fairweather. I had to wonder if it was their normal rate of collapse, or were these glaciers collapsing faster because of a change in the climate.

Alaska and northern Canada boast some of the world’s biggest ice sheets and most extensive glacial areas. The glaciers in Alaska and northern Canada hold roughly 13 percent of the glacier-bound ice on the planet.

But despite what appears to be plenty of ice, Alaska is melting fast. Alaska has been making headlines in recent years as a destination for adventure travelers who are rushing to the 49th state—not to climb or ski or hike or hunt or fish, but to see the glaciers before they’re gone.

"Alaska the 'poster state' for climate concerns," said a USA Today headline last year; “The Race to Alaska Before It Melts,” observed a 2005 headline in The New York Times, “85 Percent of Alaskan Glaciers Melting at ‘Incredible Rate,’” blared a recent headline on www.buzzle.com.

A week and a half later, in Juneau, I was able to get up close and personal with one of the retreating ice sheets, the touristy Mendenhall Glacier. I signed up for a day of informative glacier trekking with an adventure company, Above & Beyond Alaska. After a group of us had hiked about two miles to the tongue of the glacier, we practiced some glacier travel skills and rescue techniques, then climbed a small wall of ice—a wonderfully mellow day out, really.

As we hiked out, Above & Beyond guide Nina Schwabenton described the ice and surrounding rock. She also mentioned that in prior decades Juneau residents talked about the retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier in terms of tens of feet per year. Last year, though, the retreat was more than 500 feet!

I had to ask if I’d heard her correctly (I had).

In fact, researchers with the Juneau Icefield Research Program, who have monitored the Mendenhall Glacier since 1946, have found that it has retreated a whopping 580 meters (1,902 feet).

The public concern for Alaska’s glaciers took off in 2002, when a remarkable (and scary) study found that Alaska’s glaciers are melting much faster than previously thought. The study, by researchers at the University of Alaska and published in the journal Science, estimated that 24 cubic miles (96 cubic kilometers) of Alaskan glacial ice is melting each year.

“From the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, the glaciers lost about 13 cubic miles a year,” Anthony Arendt, lead author of the study, told the Associated Press in 2002. “In the last five years, that rate has almost doubled.”

All told during the past a half century or so, Alaska’s glaciers have shrunk by an estimated 500 cubic miles (2,000 cubic kilometers), the study found. And while the retreating ice has become a boon for tourism, thankfully many tourists understand what’s at stake.

"Some people are clueless or they say, 'Cool—your summers are getting longer,'" Hugh Rose, a tour guide who leads tours to the Arctic told the New York Times. "But for every one of them, we get a client genuinely concerned that Alaska is changing too quickly, and they want to see it while they can."

Chilling, I say. Cam Burns is Senior Editor in the Rocky Mountain Institute's Communications Department.