WLM | explore
to the south wouldn’t mind an honorable mention. Just
in my moment of fatigue chasing the last glacier in
Wyoming that I needed to photograph, beneath Cloud
Peak in the Bighorns, I was on my way on a three-hour
flight back to Alpine when I said to myself, “perhaps
Montana is too much.”
It didn’t take long to conquer every single one of them
in Montana in the airplane, camera in hand for the
entire odyssey.
From end to end, the glaciers of the American Rockies
span about 800 miles, from Glacier National Park to
northwest of Boulder, CO. For the most part, they
are associated with mountain ranges that are near the
border of the Great Plains. Having flown this distance,
it is something of a curiosity to see great variance
in weather characteristics. One summer of living in
Colorado featured the lowest summer snowfall at
13,100 feet. The next year living in Wyoming featured a
summer snowfall at 9,500 feet near the Montana border,
with frequent light dustings in the shadows of Grand
Teton. Timberline at 12,500’ in southern Colorado
transitions to 11,500’ in the middle of the state, later
dropping to the neighborhood of 10,000’ in Wyoming.
Small glaciers than appear at 11,000’ in southern
Montana change to small glaciers beneath 9,000’ near
the Canadian border, with quite large masses of ice at
10,000’. Where I was living at 9,360’ in Colorado, I was
staring at a glacier at the same altitude in Montana.
Since the completion of this project, I have had the
chance to explore some glaciers in the Pyrenees of
Spain and France, and the Alps in France, Switzerland,
and Italy. Curiously, timberline in that neck of the
woods is 7,500’ (despite being the same latitude as
Wyoming and Montana), with glaciers appearing at
10,700’ or so in the Pyrenees, and 9,500’ in the Alps,
with the latter featuring glaciers that look like Alaska.
At the same token, it is nowhere near as cold in those
mountain ranges as the Rockies, which brings me back
to the same question I have in each state in the Rockies:
what makes a glacier form?
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Wyoming Lifestyle Magazine | Summer 2019