A summertime Talon Glacier in need of some Canadian Rockies snowfall. Photo: Courtesy Thomas Grandi.
By: Thomas Grandi
Glaciers are constantly moving. If they stop moving, they may be dead glaciers.
Talus Lodge is situated at 2300M in the Canadian Rockies, just west of the continental divide. It’s always a fun detail; pee here, and it goes way over there (point east), and it goes over there (point west). The North/ South strip on the divide holds some of the last of the glaciation in the Rockies. Unfortunately, the small ones, like the Talon glacier, are the ones that are melting the fastest!
What intrigues me about Talus and the surrounding area is that clues show change has happened more recently than you think.
From the dining room window, you can see terminal moraines
that pushed and pulled while the glaciers were receding. Another clue is when you walk along those moraines, you find old tree trunks, proving the tree line was once much higher than it is now, hard to believe, but really, no other explanation for it. My perspective is pretty simple; glaciers grow when winter snow lasts through the summer and shrink when it doesn’t.
More recently, like this summer, we witnessed some unprecedented hot temperatures across most of the Northwest. This shock of heat did not spare the Talus zone, and it went from looking like a snowy start to our hiking season to all trails bare in a single week. The oppressive heat dome bore down us; the snow evaporated, leaving the Talon Glacier, one of our favourite ski runs, bare of snow in mid-July.
