Saying a Sad Farewell to the Grizzly and Salmon Glaciers of the Trinity Alps

            On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, I attended the Science on Tap event at the Trinity County Brewing Company. There were three forest service biologists, Justin Garwood, Ken Lindke, and Mike Van Hattem, sharing their personal experiences with and self-described “amateur” scientific study of the Grizzly and Salmon Glaciers in the Trinity Alps. These were the last two remaining glaciers in the range, clinging precipitously to the northeast corners of Thompson Peak (Grizzly) and Caesar Cap (Salmon). You can read their published paper here: https://bioone.org/journals/Northwest-Science/volume-94/issue-1/046.094.0104/20th-Century-Retreat-and-Recent-Drought-Accelerated-Extinction-of-Mountain/10.3955/046.094.0104.short or an excerpt here: https://www.michaelkauffmann.net/2020/04/the-last-glacier-in-the-klamath-mountains/.

The day before, when it was eighty degrees Fahrenheit in town, my young neighbor remarked, “It’s hot.” She’s seven, and she’s right: it’s April and we launched into late spring/early summer. This change  isn’t happening in the future, it’s happening now.

            I’m realizing the chronic, lingering feeling in my heart is grief. It’s sad to say goodbye to things, even if they are unliving, like the ice of the now extinct Salmon Glacier and the presumed extinct Grizzly Glacier. There goes our last summer-long melt source. Free water storage, gone. Water provided for at least 72 alpine plant species, transformed to bare, dry rock. Plants have been blossoming earlier this year. I hope the pollinators have been keeping up. It’s such a delicate dance, with precise timing. We live in a beautiful, fragile world.

            The three presenters were very knowledgeable, well-spoken, and honest, directly tying the stark increase in temperatures to anthropogenic activities. Their paper was published in 2020, but the last two winters were an intense addendum to their written conclusions. It was a factual, and unfortunately brutally bleak look at the trends in increasing temperature and decreasing precipitation for our mountains.

I hold out hope we might get respite storms or slightly more precipitous years to reprieve us for a season. We are still close to the ocean, after all. But the entire ecosystem around us will change dramatically in response to the new conditions. We will not see glaciers in the Alps again for a very long time, thousands—perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands—of years from now. That requires us to say goodbye to what was and prepare for what will be, which is a very daunting task.

            The presentation did a great job of driving home the local effects of this global change. The Glenzer and Conger ice shelves in Antarctica collapsed on March 21st (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149640/ice-shelf-collapse-in-east-antarctica). If you remember from my Milkankovitch Cycle article, we should be moving toward glaciation, with the poles receiving less direct sunlight, allowing continental ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice to grow. Now we’ve set in motion a largescale meltdown, with feedback loops hastening and amplifying heating.

If Antarctica melts entirely, sea level will rise by five meters (15 feet) (https://scitechdaily.com/melting-of-the-antarctic-ice-sheet-could-cause-5-meter-rise-in-sea-levels-by-the-end-of-the-millennium/). We can deny the problem, or we can start to plan. Coastal relocations, desalinization plants, widespread rain catchment, sustainable, hazard-proof homes, buildings, roads, and infrastructure. If we deny the problem and make no plans, we make yet more problems and open ourselves up to desperation, hostility, and chaos. In many ways, we have already done this. If we look ahead to the anticipated changes, we can problem-solve and work our way through to solutions that minimize harm to humans and prevent or remedy damage to the environment. We still have time to do all of this.

At the end of the glacier presentation, I approached all three men and said, with tears in my eyes and on my cheeks, “Thank you. Folks here need to hear it from you. What you say is important. Thank you.” I would have said more, but was embarrassed to be crying in public. All the same, grief is heavy and painful, and it’s always okay to cry.

Trinity County is so scenically gorgeous and full of interesting, strong people with big personalities. I have been very fortunate to meet many great humans, expanding my community ties. We will all make it further if we work together. All hands on deck! The more people we have working to solve problems, the better our quality of life will be, for everyone.