What Grinnell Taught Me About Glacier National Park's Glaciers
There's a particular kind of quiet at Upper Grinnell Lake. I hiked up on a cool morning, boots crunching over rock that ice had laid down, and when the trail finally opened onto the basin, the water was that impossible milky turquoise you only get from glacial silt — rock ground so fine it hangs in the water and scatters the light.
That lake is young. Upper Grinnell Lake wasn't always there. It formed as Grinnell Glacier retreated, meltwater pooling in the bowl the ice carved and then vacated. The U.S. Geological Survey keeps a pair of photographs I think about often: Grinnell in 1911 and again in 2016, taken from the same spot. In the first, ice fills the frame. In the second, there's a lake where the ice used to be.
I teach biology, so I'm used to explaining change over time — but standing there, the timescale collapses. This isn't a record you have to imagine. It's a place you can walk to.
The numbers
The numbers hold up the feeling. USGS estimates the park held about 80 glaciers (larger than 0.1 square kilometers) at the peak of the Little Ice Age, around 1850. By 2005, that count had dropped to 32 — a decline of nearly 60% in roughly 150 years. Physical modeling from the same researchers projects near-total disappearance of the park's glaciers by 2100, across the range of emissions scenarios they tested.
I want to be careful here, because the rule for this blog is simple: say what's true. A glacier isn't just "ice." It's ice thick and heavy enough to flow downhill under its own weight, grinding bedrock as it goes. When a body of ice shrinks below that threshold, it stops behaving like a glacier at all. That's part of why the count keeps falling — some of these aren't gone so much as demoted.
If you want to see it for yourself, the way in is the Going-to-the-Sun Road — 50 miles that cross the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, the highest point on the drive. From there the high country opens up, and the trails toward Grinnell and the glacier overlooks begin.
What stays with me isn't grief, exactly. It's attention. These places are keeping a record in plain sight — in turquoise water, bare rock, and old photographs — and all they ask is that we look closely and tell the truth about what we see. That's the whole reason I started this blog.
Go find your wild while the ice is still here to teach us.
Planning a park road trip with kids?
Long drives are part of every national park trip. I made the Screen-Free Road Trip Kit to turn the miles into part of the adventure: 35+ printable pages of road trip bingo, nature scavenger hunts, a Roadside Science Spotter, sketch prompts, and trip reflection pages for curious kids ages 7–12. Print it, pack it, and go.
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