Life After Glaciers: Hope from Visiting Glacier National Park

The glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting. Will the park still be worth visiting and preserving once they're gone?

I love backpacking in the national parks and have a long list of places I’d like to visit someday. But I knew that if I wanted to go to Glacier National Park and see any of the park’s namesake glaciers, I’d have to go soon. Really soon. The glaciers are melting—fast. That’s why I took my dream trip to Glacier National Park in August 2024.

Like many other people, I wanted to visit Glacier National Park before the park's namesake glaciers totally melt away.

Before I left, I read lots of books about the impacts of climate change on our national parks. They had titles like Before They’re Gone; Requiem for America’s Best Idea; and The Melting World. All wonderful examples of nature writing, but all written in the same pessimistic tone: It’s too late. The glaciers are melting, and we can’t stop it. These authors described their visits to the melting glaciers with wistfulness, nostalgia, and sorrow that their grandchildren would never have the opportunity to see these scenic gems as they looked in the twentieth century.

Grinnell Glacier was still there in 2024, albeit much smaller than it used to be.

Finally, it was my turn. I had seen pictures of Glacier National Park in the books, but nothing prepared me for how beautiful the park actually was. The mountains are red and yellow and blue, the lakes are turquoise from the glacial meltwater, the meadows above the tree line are a riot of colors as the flowers rush to bloom during the two months of the year when there’s no snow. Every step of the four-mile hike up the mountain on the Grinnell Glacier Trail brought new vistas of the lakes below, the waterfall above, and the carpet of wildflowers.

The hike up to the Grinnell Glacier was amazingly beautiful.

After a steep scramble up the last pile of gravel and rocks left by the receding glacier, there it was. A wall of ice showing the layers of snow from winters long past, breaking into icebergs that floated past on a beautiful blue lake, surrounded by craggy mountains soaring up into the sky. There was even less of the actual glacier left than in the most recent pictures I had seen, but I didn’t find myself wistfully wishing that ice still covered the whole lake. That’s because the lake itself was so beautiful. Far from becoming a barren desert, the Grinnell Glacier is turning into another Iceberg Lake—a nearby former glacier that’s also a popular day-hiking destination.

No photo can do justice to the beauty of the Grinnell Glacier Trail. This lake is still going to be gorgeous even when the ice reflected in it is just an icefield, not a glacier.

Backpacking along the Gunsight Pass Trail, with a side trip to Sperry Glacier, was also spectacular. Yes, the glacier was much smaller than it used to be. But what surprised me most was that the glaciers didn’t end up being the highlight of my trip to Glacier National Park. The memories I’ll treasure most are things like watching seven mountain goats walk boldly into our backcountry campsite and try to steal my stinky socks. Sitting on the shore of Gunsight Lake, watching half a dozen waterfalls trickle down the beautifully folded, multicolored rock walls into the placid water. Finding a couple beargrass flowers still blooming in mid-August. Eating the juicy huckleberries, serviceberries, and thimbleberries that grew in profusion along the trail. Even hearing the bus driver on Going-to-the-Sun Road say, “Yeah, except that we’ve lost a few glaciers, the park looks pretty much the same as it did forty years ago.”

It takes a strenuous backpack to see Sperry Glacier, the largest remaining glacier in the park accessible to hikers.

I left Glacier National Park feeling deeply happy and satisfied. My takeaway was very different from the authors of the books I had read. Yes, the glaciers are melting. No, we can’t bring them back even if we were to stop burning all fossil fuels tonight. But there will be life after glaciers. Glacier National Park is still going to be an amazing and beautiful place to visit even after the last glacier is downgraded to an ice field. There will still be flowers, mountain goats, lakes, waterfalls, and a few bears to liven things up. There will still be only two months of snow-free days to explore the high country. Will I go back even after the glaciers are gone? Absolutely.

The wildflowers in Glacier are absolutely gorgeous in the summer, as they rush to bloom before it snows again.

And, of course, my personal favorite--mountain goats! They were everywhere on the Gunsight Pass Trail.