Exploring a Rocky Mountain Glacier in the Space Between Science and Storytelling

Kate Harris writes in Lands of Lost Borders, “Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation, but exploring still exists, will always exist: in the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here.” This is exactly how I felt working at Hilda Glacier.

It was pouring rain in Banff National Park, and we were measuring streamflow at a river flowing from Hilda Glacier, our waterproof hoods tied up tight around our heads. The mosquitoes were oblivious to rain, so we alternated between swatting and measuring. The stream itself was loud: All we could hear was rushing water and the rain peppering our hoods. Still we had the feeling we were being watched.

We had a tape measure stretched across the stream, and my partner was in hip waders in the middle of the water, using a gauge to measure streamflow. Every few minutes he’d read the instrument, then yell the number to me so I could record it in our field book.

When we headed back to our home base, Parks Canada staff told us about a grizzly sow who often traveled from nearby Parker Ridge, across our study area, then up the side of the valley wall I imagine she was keeping an eye on us that day. Perhaps she was wondering what we were doing and what the point of it was.

What was the point? Why do we care about glacier water?

As glaciers around the world shrink, the area in front of them (the forefield) gets larger and more complex, which can affect when and how much water arrives downstream. This is a particularly serious issue in regions where locals rely on glacier melt for water and/or electricity generation, such as the Himalayas and South America. My 1998 study, my first solo project as an undergraduate studying geography at the University of Victoria, was meant to be a small proxy for those glaciers and how they might respond to weather conditions.

At most glaciers, for example, like the famous Athabasca Glacier (the one they drive tour buses on) which flows from the Columbia Icefield in Banff National Park, ice melts and runs directly into streams that form channels in the glacier forefield. At Hilda Glacier, however, sediment-laden meltwater from that forefield disappears underground, only to reappear outside the terminal moraine as a clear stream. Where does it travel? And what has to happen for the water to flood the forefield instead of going underground to the proglacial stream?

I wanted to tell the story of what was happening at Hilda Glacier so that other people could understand it, too.

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We visited the research site every day that May and June, hiking in with all of our equipment in heavy backpacks. Once we started setting up our humble rain catchers, measuring streams, and collecting water samples, I realized I’d bitten off far more than I could chew. There was no way I could measure exactly what was happening with such basic equipment. I would have benefitted from a real weather station. It would also have been helpful to have an automated water sampler in the proglacial stream outside the moraine, so we could collect water samples after putting a harmless dye into the stream inside the terminal moraine. By seeing where and in what concentration the dye appeared outside of the terminal moraine, we would know more about what was happening underground.

However, I was doing science on a budget and, as a newbie, I had no idea the equipment I just described even existed, nor where to get it or how to use it.

I wanted to tell the story of what was happening at Hilda Glacier so that other people could understand it, too.

My basic equipment meant that I not only collected data, but had to fill data gaps with observations and ideas of what might be happening to capture the whole scientific story. This required a combination of close observation of the local hydrology, and storytelling. I watched how the proglacial stream came to life when glacier melt started late in the morning, filling a channel that had dried overnight as it flowed towards the terminal moraine. I explored the ice caves along the valley sides, remnants of glacier ice no longer moving with the main body of ice. They echoed with the sound of melt, and I wondered if some of the more precarious pieces of ice would come loose on my head. I sketched the proglacial channel before it disappeared underground, sometimes daily, as it was constantly changing. I noted all of these events in my field book, as you never know what information will come in handy.

After several weeks of observation and measurement, we determined that, at a threshold amount of melt, the subterranean stream was overwhelmed and a surface stream formed that created a lake in the mud flats in the proglacial zone. But these events were few and far between, requiring exceptionally high melt or heavy rainfall.

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My work at Hilda Glacier was part of a long tradition of research, exploration, and storytelling in the area, most recently by geologists Kathleen Hammer and Norman Smith in the 1980s, who researched the ability of Hilda’s proglacial stream to move rocks and gravel. Evidence of their presence appeared as a battered old coffee pot they left at the site, and a painted rock that they would have used to see how far the stream could transport marked pieces of gravel.

But long before them, at the turn of the twentieth century, there had been several adventurous, science-minded women who explored the area.

Philadelphian Mary Schäffer, who eventually moved to Banff, travelled by horse pack train every summer in the early twentieth century, exploring the Rockies for four months at a time, usually with her companion Mollie Adams and guided mainly by well-known mountain guides Billy Warren (Schäffer’s future husband) and Sid Unwin. Based on the maps of her travels, she passed through the Hilda Glacier area in each of the 1904-1908 field seasons. Schäffer’s explorations took her to Wilcox Pass, Nigel Pass, and Mt Athabasca—all in the immediate vicinity of Hilda Glacier. She even had a camp named Camp Parker, on the same Parker ridge where our grizzly sow came from. I wonder if there was a local grizzly already back when she was camped there.

Sometimes I thought I caught a glimpse of Schäffer’s travel bloomers just around the next bend in the trail, as though if I walked a bit faster I might catch up with her.

Sometimes I thought I caught a glimpse of Schäffer’s travel bloomers just around the next bend in the trail, as though if I walked a bit faster I might catch up with her.

In “No Ordinary Woman,” by Janice Sandford Beck, she is quoted as saying that “the media . . . insisted that outdoor life “would have little appeal to the average woman whose time is divided between her dressmaker’s, her clubs, and the management of her maids.”” But Schäffer and Adams scoffed at this description, saying, “We can starve as well as men; the [bogs] will be no softer for us than for them; the ground will be no harder to sleep upon; the water no deeper to swim, nor the bath colder if we fall in.”

Kate Harris writes in Lands of Lost Borders, “Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation, but exploring still exists, will always exist: in the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here.” This is exactly how I felt working at Hilda Glacier, like an old-fashioned explorer trying to understand what was important about the glacier. I felt like Schäffer, who surveyed Maligne Lake with a measuring spool (which fell in the lake twice and had to be re-ordered from Toronto) and survey rod (the metal one was suspect so they switched to a piece of wood), or like Mary Vaux, another Philadelphian and friend of Schäffer’s, who spent most of her time in the Yoho region, taking on her father’s legacy of measuring the Illecillewaet and Asulkan glaciers from 1911-1922, and making first ascents of numerous mountains in the region.

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There is a picture of me, sitting next to a huge block of stagnant glacier ice up against the far west cliff of the Hilda valley. I am writing in my notebook—but am I making scientific notations or telling a story? And how much of science really is story?

Most scientists would be horrified to think of their work as a story. But I believe it is—you’re telling the what, why, how, where, and when of a particular process or site you’re measuring. Most of my knowledge of the hydrology at Hilda Glacier was based on filling data gaps with story, with what I thought was happening but couldn’t completely quantify because I didn’t have all the equipment.

I never did publish my work as it wasn’t robust enough—too much story and not enough data. I presented it at a national conference: the youngest person there, standing in front of a room full of intimidating scientists in my one set of non-field clothes, talking about numbers and graphs but wishing I had more solid evidence. I was stranded between science and story. I realized that ultimately I preferred to observe and tell stories about landscapes, rather than analyse and quantify them. I felt what Kate Harris wrote in The Walrus, “The end of all our exploring, then, is not knowledge but kinship—a deepened sense of connection to the planet and to each other, earthlings every one.” Standing before the room of scholars, I may have felt slightly alienated from their society, but I felt strongly connected to the Hilda glacier landscape and the way it changed over time, and to the people who had travelled through and studied the region in the past.