CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Picnic on a Receding Glacier

Eliot Glacier in retreat, from Cooper’s Spur on the eastern flank of Mt. Hood. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Instrument records and long-term observations show that Alpine glaciers have been retreating and thinning significantly since the end of the Little Ice Age from approximately 1300 to 1850.

Now imagine someone bringing sandwiches.

Not metaphorical ones—actual ones, wrapped in that lovely wax paper, tucked into a backpack beside crampons and thermos flasks. Someone will have packed strawberries. Someone else, a small bottle of wine for those who drink, and mountain water for those who don’t, in a bottle to be refilled again and again.

By late morning, the light will be hard and precise. The surface—what remains of it—will not be the smooth, mythic white people expect, but a kind of broken grey: meltwater channels, soot, wind-scored ridges.

It will creak sometimes, like a door remembering with nostalgia that time when it used to open.

Little will be left of many of the glaciers now, retreating not just in metres per year but in staircases. A sign will mark where one stood in 1990. Another in 1950. The past........

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