High Country News Climate Futures photo essay

Glacier National Park embodies the climate crisis in the Western United States. Melting glaciers and raging wildfires dominate our understanding of this landscape. However, another story is persisting behind the headlines. Glacier is also a landscape of resilience, adaptation, and survival. Nowhere else so clearly demonstrates the promising, though messy, path through our hotter future.

Glacier is a place of last refuge for many climate-sensitive species: harlequin ducks, meltwater stoneflies, ptarmigan, whitebark pine, pika, Jones’ columbine, glacier poppies, artic willow, bull trout, black swifts, and western bumble bees. Emissions left unchecked could push them all to extinction. However, even after more than one degree of warming, none are gone yet. Even the park’s glaciers have repeatedly outlasted predictions of melt. This is a landscape profoundly impacted by climate change, but it is still far from lost.

Importantly, this is not a passive place. Glacier is also an environment flooded with climate concern and conversation. Rangers and vacation-goers fill the hot summer days talking about climate solutions. Beyond just tacking solar panels on roofs, the park is generating electricity with micro-hydro and geothermal. Scientists are relocating bull trout to colder streams, collecting pika poop, banding harlequins, replanting whitebark pine, and more. Will any of it work in the long run? We don’t know, but it is worth trying.

Below is a sample of the images I have shot since 2018. I’m still working to document bull trout conservation, pika science, geo-thermal infrastructure, and black swift habitat. This grant would help me take these remaining pictures.