(bright music) - Hey, everybody.

Welcome to "Mossback," the official podcast of the "Mossback's Northwest" video series from Cascade PBS.

I'm Stephen Hegg.

- And I'm Knute Berger.

- And today we're getting out on the ice.

In the late 19th century, just as the West's massive glaciers began to draw tourists, Mary Vaux arrived in British Columbia.

She not only climbed the region's peaks, but began photographing and measuring one glacier in particular year after year.

She's known as Canada's first glaciologist, an early documenter of retreating ice fields that are now vanishing even more rapidly.

If you haven't already seen the video, you might take a few moments to watch it.

There are stunning shots Mount Rainier and the Canadian Rockies, as well as Mary Vaux and her work.

You can find the video in the show notes, but for now, let's head toward the snowline.

(bright music) Knute, do you remember the first time you saw a glacier and did you know what it was?

And was it on Mount Rainier?

(both laughing) - I was gonna say, I'm sure the first time I saw a glacier was when I looked at Mount Rainier as a child.

(laughing) And no, I didn't know what a glacier was, but, you know, I learned about them.

And you know, later on, when we would go car camping and that kind of thing, we would go to Mount Rainier, we'd, you know, go to places where there were glaciers and ice fields.

I didn't really know what the difference between the two, but, you know, there's a ice cave up at Big Four I used to go to when I was in summer camp and that kind of thing.

So I was aware of large amounts of ice up in the mountains.

I didn't really know what a glacier was.

- I think it was an early trip to Banff National Park that I recognized what a glacier was, because we were on that Columbia ice field and I think it's the Athabasca glaciers right in front of you.

And I remember, I'm trying to recall my early memories and not confuse them with later ones, but that it just seemed to be, you know, just this huge valley just full of ice.

- Yeah, well, I think, you know, yeah, as time went on, I began encountering glaciers, you know, I also went to Lake Louise where there's a big glacier that comes down to the lake, and I don't think it comes down to the lake anymore, but it's still there, and you know, other places in the Cascades.

And you know, what really struck me was when somebody described it to me as, "A glacier is like a river of ice."

And then right around that same time, I'm learning, well, this whole region was at one time covered with ice, ice sheets.

There were giant ice sheets which were glaciers, and they came down and, you know, I think I heard somebody say, you know, that the glacier at its thickest over Seattle was like four or five Space Needles high, which is pretty unbelievable.

So I definitely got an early sense that in earlier times there was a lot more ice, but I was still impressed with, and we'd go backpacking in the Cascades, you see glaciers cross ice fields and that kind of thing.

So you began to get, you know, by adolescence, I had a much greater appreciation for what glaciers were.

- Yeah, just a few years ago, I hiked up in the same area to see the Grinnell Glacier.

And where it ends is, you know, at a lake.

And it's so beautiful, so architectural.

But I remember learning that it was just a small remnant of what it once was.

- What had been there.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

As long as we're at it, let's have the definition of a glacier.

What is a glacier and what does it do?

- (laughing) Hell if I know.

(both laughing) - Well, you just said it was a river of ice.

- That's how I think about it.

It's a river of ice.

And, you know, for much of our lives, glaciers have been retreating or advancing.

They move and they shape the landscape.

And if you learn a little bit about the landscape, you can see the effect glaciers have had in the past, creating valleys, grinding around, you know, mountains, creating, you know, Matterhorn-type peaks when multiple glaciers are going in different direction.

You get this sense that they're sort of the architects of a lot of the landscape.

And I remember reading about John Muir and how he was one of the first and early proponents of talking about Yosemite, basically saying, "This landscape was created by glaciers," and this went against the science of the day.

And they thought, "Oh, it's preposterous."

But he was proved right.

And so I think they're fascinating from a lot of different angles.

And one of the things that got me interested, there are two things that got me interested in this story, one of which was, you know, we had just done a series on the Columbia River.

And the last episode of that series where we went to Columbia Lake, which is considered the headwaters of the Columbia.

You know, the glacier, it's fed by snow, ice and glacier melt.

And to some degree, that's lessening over time.

And so it got me thinking about, "Well, what's the future of the Columbia River?"

So that was kind of one element of it.

Another element was when we did an episode on early drivers going out into the countryside, and also tourists going by rail.

And that got me interested because glaciers, it turns out, were like this huge way to promote tourism in the West.

And whether it was the Canadian Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, you know, the railroads were trying to get passengers onto trains, get 'em out into the far west.

You know, they completed the Transcontinental Railroad.

"Let's get people out there to see this incredible landscape."

And what was the big draw?

Mountains, of course, but what was on lots of those mountains?

Glaciers, there was something about glaciers that was drawing people to them.

- I've stayed at the Mini Glacier Hotel.

- Right, exactly.

- And that was one of those destinations that the railroads built to lure tourists to the beautiful Glacier National Park.

- Yeah, and I became fascinated by this photograph that I found online.

And it's a photograph of a train and a bunch of like 1914-era automobiles and this massive crowd of people.

And this was a race from Tacoma to Mount Rainier.

And it was part of a promotion that became sort of known as four hours to the glacier, four hours to the mountain.

And it was a race between this train and people driving these cars.

And the train won, barely.

But I was fascinated by the fact that the appeal was the Nisqually Glacier, which is one of the glaciers people are familiar with if you've been to Paradise.

And you know, that was like a destination, and you could drive right to the foot of the glacier.

And in fact, there was an ice cream stand (laughing) right at the foot of the glacier.

So for parched tourists.

And so I was just kind of fascinated with this element of glaciers as a tourist attraction, and also, you know, their history in the environment and shaping of the Northwest.

- Mount Rainier, of course, is the place closest to Seattle where you can see glaciers, as we've talked about, the Nisqually is maybe the most famous one, and features strongly in any story about glaciers in the Northwest.

So naturally for this episode, you and your video team and Mossback podcast producer, Sara Bernard, headed up to Crystal Mountain, and where you took a gondola up to the mountain.

How was that?

(Knute laughing) - Well, that was great.

So we wanted to be able to have, we thought about filming up at Paradise, and you know, we felt like, "Well, if we're talking about glaciers, we need to talk about Mount Rainier and show Mount Rainier."

But, you know, we weren't in a position to be able to, you know, hike up Mount Rainier to a glacier.

And well, it turns out that Crystal Mountain, you know, you can take a gondola up to the ridge.

You're at, I don't know, between 7,000 and 8,000 feet.

You have the Nisqually River coming down off the Nisqually Glacier.

And in the background, it's just this fabulous portrait of the mountain.

And we took two days.

The first day was sort of a scouting day.

And of course we got there, we went up, you know, gondolas, we had arranged with the people there to haul our equipment up and do all that.

But anyway, we got up there the first day, and it was just totally socked in.

- You never know with Mount Rainier, do you?

(Knute laughing) - You never know.

And you know, we had delayed and delayed this shoot until fairly late in our shooting season, but we figured, "Well, August will give us the best, you know, chance."

Well, you know, it was like the worst possible (laughing) thing, you know?

- That's why they call it the Mountain in the Clouds.

- Yeah, the Mountain in the Clouds.

And you know, the sort of, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't mountain.

But we could tell that, despite all the clouds, we could kind of tell, you could kind of see just the tip of the rim, and then other times you could see kind of the base.

So you could tell kinda (laughing) where it was.

And we decided, "Okay, well, you know, if it clears, we'll be able to shoot it tomorrow in this particular location," - Early on, Mount Rainier became a tourist attraction.

What is the evidence, what's the earliest evidence that you see of people visiting the glaciers on Mount Rainier?

- We know that Indigenous people visited the mountain.

And it wasn't until really the late 19th century that other people started to climb it.

There are people who went by it and commented on it.

I mean, you know, whether it was Vancouver or Theodore Winthrop who wrote a travel account of crossing Washington, talked a lot about Mount Rainier and what an incredible kind of savage and majestic entity it was.

He didn't specifically talk about the glaciers, but that's largely what he was responding to.

I mean, Mount Rainier is the most glaciated mountain in the contiguous United States.

And so it has more glaciers on one peak than any place else around.

And it's part of that, you know, when you first saw, when did you first see a glacier?

I mean, what we were seeing is a very unique mass of glaciers, plural, on Mount Rainier.

And immediately people wanted to find ways to get up to the top of the mountain.

That just seemed to be something that people had to do.

And then it became a much more regular thing as outdoor sports in the late 19th century began to kind of take off here.

- Would you say that glacier tourism has had a big impact on the Northwest?

- Yeah, I think so.

I mean, it certainly played a role in, you know, Mount Rainier was one of the, what, first four national parks.

So it was a national park early on, people recognized it was special.

And there were rail, that was the way people went to Mount Rainier, you took a train, you went to the foot of the Nisqually Glacier, you went to a lodge.

And then you could take horses up or you could walk up to the glacier.

But, you know, if you're talking about Mount Hood, if you're talking about, you know, other places in the Rockies and the Cascades, in the Selkirks, you know, the idea of building lodges that train loads of tourists can come.

And a lot of it had to do with, you know, people seeing that what we had here was even more incredible than say Switzerland.

I mean, that was a popular, you know, tourism glacier, ice field, mountain climbing destination in Europe.

A lot of Americans had gone over.

But, you know, we're hearing about that from other places that it was sort of like, "Well, this beats that."

- Well, then Alaska.

- Well, yeah, Alaska, that's, yeah, a whole other level.

- The cruise industry to Alaska to see glaciers.

- Yeah, the cruise industry of the late 19th century and early 20th century was trains, right?

The cruise industry now is, yeah, those big honking (laughing) cruise ships that come into Seattle every summer and take, you know, people up to see the glaciers and the glacial activity.

And I think glaciers represented to people this kind of raw, wild, active, you know, it's not like looking at a cedar tree, you know, even, or you know, a sequoia might be 1,000 years old, but it's just standing there.

(laughing) With glaciers, there's movement, there's ice falling off, there's water coming out there.

You can see, if you're at the foot, well, I think of it as a foot of the glacier, it's really the head of the glacier, you can see how it's grinding the soil.

You can see the gorgeous lake water that has that glacier green.

- Let's talk about Mary Vaux.

In reading about her and watching the video, I'm surprised her name doesn't come up more often, especially in the Northwest.

Who was Mary Vaux and how did she first end up in British Columbia?

- She was completely unknown to me when I started kind of poking around.

So after we did the Columbia River episode, I was just doing some looking online at what's happening to the glaciers in British Columbia, because they're melting more rapidly than they have in the past, and there's some fairly dire predictions about how long the Coast Mountains and others will have glaciers at all.

And of course, that's an issue in Glacier National Park, which is losing its glaciers.

And while I was, you know, poking around, I saw a reference to her.

And it mentioned that she was an early person who recorded glacier retreat before most people were doing that in a systematic way.

And I thought, "Well, that's interesting."

I also noticed that she came out on the train to a lodge (laughing) in the Selkirk Mountains, on the Canadian Pacific route.

And that was curious to me because of this interest in the fact that these lodges and trains were responsible for bringing people out.

And here's somebody who came out as a result of that, and suddenly got fascinated by glaciers.

- Where was she from?

Where did she come out from?

- So she was a member of a fairly well-to-do Quaker family from Pennsylvania.

She was an American.

And her father took the whole family on a tour of the West.

So they came out West, they went to Yosemite and a bunch of other places.

And on the way home, they were heading through the Selkirks.

And at that time, the route took them right by a lodge that was at the foot of the Isla Silhouette Glacier, which then was called the Great Glacier.

And it was a massive glacier in the Selkirk range that came down.

And tourists could come and they could stay at the lodge and hike up to the glacier.

And the people who ran the lodge knew that they had a great thing here.

There was this like great access to big ice (laughing) right there.

And they hired guides from Switzerland to come and take people on guided tours of the ice.

Well, Mary became very fascinated with this.

She climbed on the glaciers, she and her brothers.

And she's a young adult at this point, and just they were enchanted with the gorgeous, you know, scenery of that area and the Rocky Mountains.

And so she goes back to Philadelphia, and then some years later, comes back out, and she notices that this glacier that she saw in the early 1880s has retreated.

It's much smaller than it was when she was out there, you know, five, six, seven, eight years before.

And she became fascinated.

She was a photographer.

And so she began photographing, documenting the glacier, climbing all over it.

You know, there are these magnificent photos of her in her bloomers, and standing, you know, way up on the ice.

I mean, yeah, just really fantastic photographs.

So, you know, she's an early woman alpinist, but she and her brothers have this sort of scientific interest, and that's very early in people taking an interest in, "Gee, this glacier is retreating.

How far is it retreating?

How much is it retreating?"

- Well, how did she measure it?

- Well, they would go out and they would take exact measurements, and then they would pound metal stakes to show where the glacier was.

And then the next year, they'd come out again, and see, "Oh yeah, it's retreated 20 feet or whatever."

And she had a camera and with glass plate negatives, you know, the- - The big kind.

- big kind.

- Heavy.

- And later, smaller versions.

And she's out there taking high-resolution pictures not only of climbing, of people on the glaciers, but also documenting this sort of retreat.

And so it's a very early kind of focus on what's happening to the glaciers, and systematically, year after year.

So she did this, you know, for, what, maybe like 30 years, she came out, you know, every year, and she created a record.

She and her brothers, they wrote papers about it.

They got some of those papers published.

They wrote down all the stuff, and they had the photographic evidence to back it up, which, you know, began this whole study of, "Oh, glaciers don't always advance.

They retreat.

Let's watch it happen.

How is that happening?"

- Can you tell from the evidence, from reading her work, or whatever they published, was there a sense of foreboding and doom, like we have today, about this glacier retreating?

Because I would imagine that there was no thought of human-caused climate change with regards to the use of fossil fuels, et cetera, like there is today.

I mean, we know why glaciers are retreating, and we have an idea of what is gonna happen.

Where were they with this back then?

- Yeah, I don't get a sense that there was any sense of foreboding.

I think they were just recording a natural phenomenon.

And of course, glaciers even, you know, within our lifetime, some glaciers are advancing, some are retreating, some are gaining mass, some are losing mass.

That balance has tipped in more recent years as to where there's more consistent loss.

But, you know, people now know, "Oh, glaciers don't all behave the same way," but when when you can see that many of them are behaving in a certain way, like melting, (laughing) and it's happening all over the world, you have much more of a glacial, (laughing) you know, sort of consciousness.

But I don't sense there was any foreboding about it.

I think they were- - It was documentation.

- just curious about documenting it.

- So she ultimately published these findings.

So was she contributing to science in real time?

Was her work being noticed, and was it contributing to a scientific discussion?

- Yeah, the work she and her brothers were doing, you know, did get noticed, people did note it.

And eventually her brothers stopped coming out.

They weren't as into it as she was in terms of coming out.

(Stephen laughing) They had careers and whatnot.

She really made this a central part of her life.

And you know, mentioned she's also a mountain climber.

You know, you know, she visited other places.

And one of the things that grew out of that and what she's known for in this country is this epic multi-volume work that she did on North American wildflowers.

- Well, I was going to say, when I was googling and doing some reading on her, the first thing that popped out is that she was a botanical artist.

And that work was donated to the Smithsonian.

And she's an expert.

- Yeah, I mean, I've even heard people say that she's sort of the Audubon of wildflowers, that that work was really incredible, both the research that she did, studying the plants, finding the plants, and also then rendering them in beautiful, realistic colors.

And this was part of kind of a later stage of her life.

You know, in the beginning, she and her brothers are coming out, hanging out at the glaciers, exploring the mountains around the area.

The brothers then sort of cease coming out, she continues to come.

And she does all her own photography, by the way.

So she's lugging the stuff up.

She might get help with people carrying it and whatnot, but she's doing the photography.

She's also going back to the lodge where she had a makeshift dark room.

So she's processing all the images.

And so she's like really on her hands and knees a lot, engaged with observing nature, enjoying nature, hiking.

And then a little bit later in life, in the early 20th century, she meets a paleontologist, who happens to be head of the Smithsonian, (laughing) Charles Doolittle Walcott.

And they get married.

And so during those years, he is known as the discoverer of the Burgess Shale, which is a nearby collection or discovery of a collection of a fossil deposit that completely revolutionized our knowledge about how life evolved, because it preserved earlier critters that people didn't know about and didn't know existed like that at that time.

And so he's this, you know, famous paleontologist, highly respected.

They're now a couple, and they begin returning to the Rockies and to the Selkirks.

He goes with her every year.

And this is while she's working on this work that the Smithsonian then publishes, I'm sure, with his sponsorship and whatnot.

- Well, not only that, if that wasn't enough, you wrote that she's the first woman to summit a peak taller than 10,000 feet.

- Yeah, that's what I've read.

(laughing) Yeah.

You know, she was strong.

She was, you know, able to, and it's in this era of, you know, when the Mountaineers develop, the Mazamas, the climbing club in Oregon, which actually preceded the Mountaineers.

You know, you're getting people in general, the tourists aren't satisfied with just staying in a lodge.

They might stay in a lodge, but they're also camping, they're also climbing mountains, they're climbing glaciers, they're adventuring more.

And she was definitely part of that cohort and that era.

And the photographs document that very well too.

- What do people say about her in her time?

Is she known?

Is she well known for her work?

- Well, she- - Or does this work come to light after her?

- I think it's after mostly.

She's mainly known for her wildflower work and this great volume, you know, multi-volume series of these images.

That was very important.

But I think that she is not particularly well known, I mean, there's a mountain named after her, Mount Mary Vaux.

But, you know, she's not a household word.

And I think partly what happened was people later came along and saw the body of work that she created.

You know, all of her photographs and whatnot are in a museum in Banff.

And also, as people have more recently become interested in the behavior of glaciers and in glacier retreat, in climate change and that kind of thing, her work, I think, then was rediscovered in terms of people saying, "Wow, here is somebody who was like way ahead of us."

(laughing) - Is she more well known in Canada as a glaciologist and more well known in the United States as a botanical artist?

- Yeah, I think that's fair to say.

- Interesting.

- But she's not a household name in either country.

But I think, you know, there's so much work going into monitoring glaciers and behavior, there's so much denial about climate change and these kinds of things, that having photographic evidence that goes back not just 100 years, but, you know, goes back 150 years, you know, is special, that's not common.

And I think one of the things in our video, which people should click on and check out just for the visuals, is this before-and-after or then-and-now component of glacier behavior.

So the Isla Silhouette Glacier was a half hour walk from the lodge where Mary worked, right?

Staying at the lodge, she can walk a half hour, and she's right at the foot of this massive glacier.

It's a four-hour hike today.

That glacier has retreated so far up the mountain, it would take you four hours to get there.

And the lodge no longer exists.

(laughing) The railroad rerouted and the lodge shut down.

But nevertheless, people still climb up to the glacier.

But I think it's the kind of thing that brings home dramatically a story that we're seeing playing out, you know, internationally.

And whether you think it's a crisis or not, you know, might depend on your political views, but it's undeniable that we're in a period of rapid glacier shrinkage.

- Well, Mount Rainier, as you said, has more glaciers than any other mountain in the Lower 48.

Where are Mount Rainier's glaciers in this flux?

What's going on there?

- Well, they're shrinking.

I'm thinking it's, what, maybe three glaciers have disappeared recently, in recent years, that now they're- - Of 30?

- Stevens Glacier.

Yeah, so you've got three that have basically vanished within the last few years.

And at best, they're like the Stevens Glacier, is like just a little patch of ice, basically.

It's no longer a frozen river moving dynamically.

And so they're disappearing one by one.

And then you can see this though all throughout the Cascades.

You can see it in the Canadian Coast Range, the Canadian Rockies.

I mean, it's happening all the way.

And we also know it's happening in the Himalayas and, you know, Switzerland.

So much so that the news reports you hear about glacier discoveries today have to do with, you know, whether an ancient corpse fell out of one.

(Stephen laughing) Or, (laughing) you know, a climber who disappeared in 1908 (laughing) is found.

You know, we're recovering artifacts from where the ice has been from earlier times.

So, you know, the story is they're diminishing.

And the question is, you know, what's the significance of that?

- Did Mary Vaux really start the study of glaciers and their movement?

- I think there were people who were studying glaciers before her.

You know, and as I mentioned, John Muir and others theorizing the role that glaciers had played.

And those, you know, glaciers still existed, so I don't think they necessarily knew, "Are the glaciers gonna come back, or are they going away, or are they just always here?"

You know, I think there were a lot of questions about that.

So I think what's unique in her case is, well, you know, she decided, she and her brothers decided that they were gonna quantify what was happening at this one particular glacier that they were really impressed by called the Great Glacier.

And year after year, they could see that it was getting smaller.

So that's interesting, and they documented that.

And you know, it provides a kind of baseline for scientists to work from.

And it also provides a very visual, dramatic sense of, "Well, here's what it was like when you were in Boy Scouts, and here's what it's like now."

And you can hardly see it, (laughing) you know?

And this is happening throughout the Cascades.

You know, we got pictures from, you know, all over to show the then and now, and it's dramatic.

And so then there's the question about, well, what are the consequences?

And I think there are lots of consequences.

There was an article just recently about how hydropower globally is diminishing, and you can't necessarily get that back by just building more dams if the water's not there.

- [Stephen] If there's not flow.

- Right.

- If there's not runoff.

Right, and of course this always happens in times of drought and things like that.

But the question is, the part of that that are fed by glaciers or ancient ice fields that aren't quite glaciers, but they're repositories of ice, you know, if that water supply runs out or runs low, where does that leave us?

Not just in terms of drinking water or crops, or whatever, where does it leave us in terms of clean energy?

- Mount Rainier, of course, is omnipresent, you know, the center of our field of vision.

But Glacier National Park has many, many glaciers.

What is the state of the glacial activity at Glacier National Park?

- Well, I think Glacier National Park used to have some, like, maybe 80 glaciers, something along those lines.

It now has, what, 25?

Those are thought to be gone within the next few decades.

I mean, within, you know- - That's unbelievable.

- within the lifetime of many people alive now.

- Yeah.

- And I remember on visiting Glacier National Park, my first thing on looking at it was, "Where are the glaciers?"

You know, I didn't visit Glacier National Park until, I don't know, sometime in the '90s.

And, you know, I was very unimpressed.

You know, if you grow up near Mount Rainier, you have a different sense of (laughing) glaciers.

And they were already, you know, on the way out then.

There's a great lodge there that of course is part of the history of the park.

Well, there are many great lodges, many glaciers lodge.

The one that I've stayed at was an East Glacier, and even now, the Empire Builder, the Northern Pacific train pulls right up across the street from that.

And you get out, and it's actually a spectacular lodge because the interior is built like a cathedral with the columns and these old-growth Doug fir trees all have the bark still on.

So they've been treated.

And they were cut like in Oregon and Washington, and brought out on these special flat cars by the railroad company, which set it up.

And so it's like a cathedral of old-growth wood inside.

The irony to me is that the lodge is probably (laughing) more permanent than the glaciers, you know?

It's this, you know, impressive edifice of a time and a sensibility, and it's very impressive, at least I thought so.

But you get outside, and yes, the mountains are majestic, the scenery's beautiful, the grizzly bears and the elk and everything.

But somehow visiting those places today, you almost have a sense of the tenuousness and almost a nostalgia.

It's more like, "Wow, it used to be here and now it's way up there somewhere and I can barely see it," you know?

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