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GLACIERS
of the Rockies
By Garrett Fisher
Images by Garrett Fisher
I
keep getting asked how I came to love glaciers so
much. My replies have been to the effect that it’s a
silly question. Shouldn’t everyone know I came out
of the womb knowing I like punishing rivers of ice?
I suppose it isn’t an irrational question, as I grew up in
Upstate New York, where the nearest glaciers are probably
actually in Wyoming, and I hadn’t seen or heard of a
single one of them until adulthood. My earliest recollection
of discovering rocky terrain was from a book on a shelf
in my third-grade classroom, noting above timberline
mountains. I still remember dragging my mother during
open house to show her the book, for which I remember
her cynical platitudes in response. My revelation merely
encouraged her to educate me on the danger of airplanes
and mountains, a task that clearly failed.
The history of the most recent Ice Age is a prominent
part of science curriculum where I was born, as the
entire place was covered in piles of ice during the last
glacial maxima, leaving their mark in the form of the
Finger Lakes region and an abundance of cirques
in what small mountains exist in New York and the
Northeast. As a lover of snow, I thought the idea was
kind of neat, that so much of the white stuff can fall that
it piles up, destroys everything, and scours new terrain.
In effect, glaciers represent the ability for the earth
to literally move mountains, which in retrospect was
fascinating in the stimulus-bereft days of grade school.
When the time came to move to Wyoming, I had come
to understand that there were glaciers in the state,
eventually researching some curious facts, such as that
the largest glacier in the American Rockies is in the
Wind River Range, not Glacier National Park, as most
would assume. I also came to understand that some
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Wyoming Lifestyle Magazine | Summer 2019