Revisiting the Emmons Glacier after 20 years

Twenty years ago this week, Tom and I hiked the Emmons Moraine trail to look at the outlet, or “snout,” of the Emmons Glacier, source of the White River in Mt Rainier National Park. It looked so easy to go off trail and down the gravelly, silty, rocky slope to the river that we could not resist doing it. We picked our way through thickets of young fir and alter trees that hadn’t looked so dense from up above. We listened to the roar of the silt-filled, opaque river and heard boulders that we could not see rattling downstream in the tremendous force of the water. We ended up getting quite close to the snout.

During the past few summers, 2020 through 2023, we visited the Emmons Overlook located on another trail. That’s a lot farther away from the glacier than the Moraine trail is, but with the long perspective we could see that the terrain was different. With binoculars, we tried to visualize where our descent path to the riverbed might have lain in 2003, and could not see a likely place. Also, there’s a large turquoise lake we didn’t remember from being in the valley in 2003. We speculated that these changes were because the glacier had receded, and that we’d descended under very different conditions.

Yesterday, Tom and I went back to the Emmons Moraine trail for the first time since 2003 to take a closer look. It confirmed our thought that we’d never have descended this slope (on the right in the photo below; the glacier snout, the river source, is the hole on the left, with the white ribbon of river coming out). It’s steep and loose and also a very long way to the river.

The photo above shows the view to our right. Below, looking to our left from the same spot on the trail, and also a long way off, is the lake.

On our way out of the park later, we stopped at the ranger station. Several men were waiting to talk to the ranger about getting their backpacking permits revised for the next night, and since I had a quick question, she let me ask it. 

“The Emmons Moraine trail,” I began, “…the lake you can see from it…” I hesitated, realizing everyone in this small room was about to hear me ask if the lake was “new.” As if I thought maybe the park was landscaped by a designer? Anyway I forged on. “We don’t think that lake existed twenty years ago, when we bushwhacked down to the snout. Could that be correct, that the lake is less than 20 years old?”

The ranger’s answer: “Yes, it very well could be. The lake was left behind by the retreating glacier.”

And now the glacier not only has created a lake, but it’s retreated at least another half a mile, so that we have to look all the way to our left to see the lake and all the way right to see the glacier. All of this in what feels to us like very recent memory. It’s the most visual experience of climate change I’ve seen personally. All the glaciers are shrinking, of course — a disaster. I’d like to think sometimes they shrink and sometimes they grow, which throughout geologic time was true, but can the glaciers ever advance again given today’s temperature trends?

So in the first photo above, from 2003, the spot where the lake is today is probably right behind us.

The lake is beautiful anyway. We’d like to hike to it, but I’m not convinced it’s within our abilities – I don’t think a trail has been built, and it seems very steep around it, to me. We are super pleased with having hiked so much in Mt Rainier National Park over the past 26 years — since I was in my early 30s — and we love having this memory of exploring off trail, which we recorded by highlighting our topo map and dating it. (We always do that.)

To be clear, we never hike off trail in the high meadows, where the plants don’t grow back if they get trampled. Don’t do it! They only have about 10 weeks every year to grow, flower, and reproduce. But going off trail in gravel and boulders once in a while will not hurt the ever-changing riverbed, I believe.

Here’s more on how climate change is affecting the Emmons Glacier and others, researched by Dr Claire Todd and Dr Michelle Koutnik. 

Here’s the snout through the binoculars: