“The future remains inscrutable and largely unwritten. But if love is paying attention, then our job is to keep watch. Even when it breaks our hearts.” — Julia Rosen (When Climate Change Came for My Favorite Glacier)
The ice beneath my feet is blue-green marble, ancient and impossibly cold. I’m standing on Matanuska Glacier on a cloudy August, one of thirty tourists in helmets and crampons, and I’m trying to remember what it felt like to be nearly alone here.
For the sake of private time on the glacier, there are but stolen moments to break from the pack, to meander around wandering rocks, peek into the brackish water of basal ponds, and touch walls of ice. Even to bottle the clean water trickling down icefalls is a group effort.
This is a collective viewing, not a personal one.
It’s a different age from many years ago. Though it’s known as one of the few drive-up glaciers accessible via car in Alaska, Matanuska wasn’t visited by many people when I was a teen in the late 1970s.
“I have something to show you,” Bob told me, his senior to my junior year in high school. In his 1967 Ford Galaxy, we started off.
At the end of the highway, Matanuska was my “first” glacier. You’ll remember that experience surely as a first kiss.
My teenage journal recalls sheer love for her, how the ice beneath my feet began its journey centuries before, “pressed from snowfall, high in the mountains.” How her immortal crunch announced each step across an aquarium blue that glowed from within.
Ice pinnacles towered above me as I gazed into the depths of sapphire crevasses. The abstract concept of “glacier” transformed into something achingly tangible—a living entity possessing her own rhythms and secrets. I went without crampons, probably in unsensible shoes. Bob didn’t spoil his secret.
But we went there. I saw, touched. Fell in awe. Matanuska entered my imagination. I would go on to see many other glaciers. But never forget her.
Those who went there, like me in the 1970s, cherished more free-spirited attitudes toward glaciers. Rampant lawlessness ruled the ice: Bob and I witnessed a strange young man trying to straddle an iceberg in the melting proglacial lake. He yahooed. He positioned himself on an icy platform and leapt to the berg as though riding a rodeo bull.
No one came to stop his exuberance. We continued our explorations, utterly alone. Bob and I slid and danced beneath a full sun.
Now in my 63rd year, I visit the Matanuska Glacier again. No more wild cowboys trying to ride the giant bergs. No more loud music from the parking lot. The glacier is guarded from whooping glacier enthusiasts of that brand by its new designation as the only glacier in the U.S. whose access is owned by an American tribal organization. They guard the glacier—and people who might harm themselves—by requiring a guide. This is a good thing.
Thousands of glacier tourists trek here each summer to view the twenty-seven-mile wonder for themselves. They form a tidy, supervised line behind tour guides. They use walking poles, don helmets, and are mandated to wear crampons.
We’ve arrived at a time on life’s continuum when these ice gods warrant self-discipline, mingled in all that hot awe. A time when glaciers rule the world again, because their demise will mean a flooded Earth. People pay $50-$100 for this one-hour guided tour. They don’t dance the salsa. They don’t fall into crevasses. And they don’t ride the bull.
Now, too, the well-heeled traveller can plunk down $1,000 a night and camp in a yurt on Matanuska Glacier in more remote spots. They’ll also need to pay for the helicopter that flies them. There’s a cushy mattress platform, a warm stove, and even a steam bath offered in the brochures. The popularity of this tourism offering represents another change in how glaciers are viewed these days, literally and figuratively.
The change isn’t just in how we behave on glaciers. It’s why we come.
*****
Alaska’s 34,000 square miles of glaciers make it the most heavily glaciated area outside of the polar regions. These remnants of the last Ice Age aren’t fossils, and they are not extinct. A glacier’s breath exudes life in the snowmelt, filling rivers and lakes. Their ancient work mowed and contoured the landscape, knocked mountains over or squeezed them up, flattened surfaces, carved deep gorges and fjords. Glaciers’ furrowed plough marks extend across lands they have not yet departed. They continue to shape the lands.
We take these glaciers into our being. We drink their fresh water, since several supply entire towns and Alaska’s biggest city. Their sediment carries on the winds to fertilise fields for vegetables on sale at farmers’ markets. Name an Alaska place magnificent in its rimmed landscape guarding a body of water—Tracy Arm, Kachemak Bay, Prince William Sound—and you might want to know the names of the glaciers nearby that, over time, nurture even our seafood that goes to markets along the west and east coasts.
Likewise, all over the world, these frozen giants harken back to earlier ages. They remain fiercely relevant. New York’s Hudson Highlands carry rock sculpted by the Laurentide Ice Sheet long ago. In the Rockies, Arapaho Glacier feeds the city of Boulder with icy waters for drinking and watering wildlife alike. Thwaites “Doomsday” Glacier in Antarctica weeps. It urges scientists to warn that its massive melt would transform the world if we don’t slow global warming.
Growing conversant in the names of glaciers has become essential knowledge, not just to shine at Trivia Pursuit. They aren’t distant wonders. Their names now live in our psyche. Certain ones are precious to our hearts. Others haunt our collective future.
Naturalist and Alaska glacier pioneer John Muir believed the great creator cast an eye on the possibilities: “Nature chose for a tool not the earthquake or lightning… but the tender snow flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries…”
Those tender snow flowers are falling less often now, and melting faster when they do.
Consider Muir’s glacier, the one he explored and solo-hiked on three separate trips from 1879 to 1899. The eloquent scripturient rhapsodised about his glacier in numerous writings. That Muir Glacier would prove the original poster child for global warming amid a great deal of publicity Muir sought is an irony he likely imagined. We must remember that dramatic global warming has accelerated over the past century. And in a sense, the American reckoning with it happened to start with his glacier. The massive 200-foot-tall face of Muir’s glacier is now gone completely, transformed into a braided waterway. It stretches thirteen miles long, whereas during his time it was an estimated 40 miles.
Yet, there Muir was, in the late 19th century, nonchalantly dragging a sledge along its icy expanse. Aboard the sledge was a bearskin blanket lined in red quilting that he used to cover himself while lying upon the sledge as his bed platform. He slept on the glacier at night, under a summer’s twilight sky. His detailed journal entry in Travels in Alaska shows an accident-prone Muir who experienced temporary blindness after he forgot to protect his eyes from the snow’s sun glare. Yes, he fell into a crevasse, too, but lucky stars travelled over him:
July 20, 1890 – Near the front of the glacier, the ice was perfectly free, apparently, of anything like a crevasse, and in walking almost carelessly down it, I stopped opposite the large granite Nunatak Island, thinking that I would there be partly sheltered from the wind. I had not gone a dozen steps toward the island when I suddenly dropped into a concealed water-filled crevasse, which on the surface showed not the slightest sign of its existence. This crevasse, like many others, was being used as the channel of a stream, and at some narrow point, the small cubical masses of ice into which the glacier surface disintegrates were jammed and extended back farther and farther till they completely covered and concealed the water. Into this I suddenly plunged, after crossing thousands of really dangerous crevasses, but never before had I encountered a danger so completely concealed. Down I plunged over head and ears, but of course, bobbed up again, and after a hard struggle succeeded in dragging myself out over the farther side. Then I pulled my sledge over close to Nunatak cliff, made haste to strip off my clothing, threw it in a sloppy heap, and crept into my sleeping bag to shiver away the night as best I could.
*****
Like Muir, people seem increasingly willing to travel long distances to trek on a live glacier or even to view it from a distance.
They act as if time is running out. Alaska’s easily accessed glaciers are mobbed in summertime by eager visitors. Exit Glacier, an orphan caught in climate change, visited by President Obama in 2015, receives upward of 400,000 visitors a year. That is, for a tiny visitor centre and a two-mile-long glacier viewed at the end of an easy hike. On the nearby Harding Icefield, of which Exit is an outflow glacier, people are known to haul their own sledges or pack in tents and camp overnight, with permission.
Tourists tend to put their money where their values go. The Alaska Travel Industry Association reports a conservative estimate that 30 per cent of statewide tourism, roughly $150–$250 million per year, is attributable to glacier-related tourism. A higher estimate by the same agency suggests that more like 50 per cent of statewide tourism spending goes to see these ice gods, which would mean $250–$400 million per year attributable to glacier-related tourism.
This aligns with the scale seen in other glacier-centric destinations. Glacier National Park in Montana alone generates over $550 million in local economic output annually, showing how powerful glacier-driven visitation can be. Yet Glacier National Park has lost more than a third of its named glaciers since 1966. Visitors come to see what remains, to bear witness before it’s gone.
As I write this in late 2025, the previous summer fell within the hottest decade ever recorded. NOAA reports that 2024 was the warmest year in the 175-year global temperature record, with a surface temperature more than 2.3°F (1.29°C) above the 20th-century average — part of an unbroken string of record-setting summers this decade.
As new records accumulate, global heating and climate change will continue to reshape glaciers. Glaciers will continue to shape climate change through their runoff, adding to the ocean’s rising sea levels. Rising sea levels will determine where people can live and where they cannot.
As glaciers melt, the flood of fresh water they pour into the salty ocean disrupts major circulation patterns. These shifts in ocean currents alter how heat moves through the atmosphere, contributing to increasingly unpredictable weather, including hurricanes.
*****
Back on Matanuska Glacier, the thirty of us stand in our helmets and crampons. Water bottles press against ice waterfalls. Cameras capture the impossible blue. We are quiet now, these summer pilgrims. No one yahoos. We understand, perhaps in ways my teenage self could not, that we are standing on ephemera, on ice that remembers centuries but may not see another.
Guide Jason leads us carefully around the crevasses. He points out wandering boulders the size of washing machines that roll miles from where they start. He explains the cheese-wedge-shaped structures of ice pyramids to define “seracs.”
The tourists listen. They take photos. They touch the ice with reverence. Their astonishment echoes from cave walls, but other than that, they are silent. I take from conversations overheard: Some come for adventure, some for the Instagram moment, but many come for the same reason people visit dying relatives—to say goodbye, to bear witness, to remember.
“I have something to show you…,” Bob told me all those years ago.
Matanuska sat at the end of the long car ride and the walk across a parking lot. I never forgot her. It took me nearly 40 years and many glaciers later to get back.
Matanuska, though, is not one to weep over—yet. This glacier holds her own. She is neither receding nor growing, but reportedly sits stable. According to U.S. Geological Survey studies from 2020 to 2023, Matanuska sees “limited retreat” compared to other Alaska glaciers. Its terminus position has been “largely stationary in recent decades.”
As I leave the glacier, it’s on the tip of my tongue to congratulate dear Matanuska Glacier aloud for this feat in a heated modern era. I touch my old friend’s icy flank one last time and whisper, “Well done.”
Really, I could shout it, like the Yahoo guy of my youthful memory. I start, but my voice feels hoarse. The young people might glance back at me as if I’m out of mind. Like the guy trying to ride an iceberg.
We are a generation caught between awe and grief, between the freedom of my 1970s glacier adventure and the knowledge of what’s being lost. This is what it means to visit glaciers in the Alaska summer now. We come not just to see beauty, but to keep a collective watch. Even when it breaks our hearts.
