When he began guiding walking tours on the Athabasca Glacier in 1985, Peter Lemieux thought he was working in one of the coolest places on the planet.
But this summer, as Lemieux marks 30 years of leading tourists on foot tours of North America’s most visited glacier, he admits his perspective has changed.
“It’s been an evolution,” said Lemieux, an ACMG guide who makes his home in Canmore with his wife and son. “At first you think, wow, this is one of the coolest places on earth. But over time you see it as not isolated, but see how connected it is globally. You realize stuff that happens here affects people all over the continent, particularly with water.”
On a typically sunny, cloudy, bluebird, snowy July day, Lemieux and assistant guide Mike Mariash led 11 guests on the glacier. Stopping intermittently as we walked with small crampons attached to our boots, Lemieux shared his prodigious knowledge about the Athabasca and its parent, the Columbia Icefield.
The largest mass of ice in the Rocky Mountains, the Columbia Icefield covers 325 square kilometres, in some places as thick as 300 metres. Meltwater flowing from the Icefield via six major outlet glaciers feeds rivers that ultimately empty into three oceans – the Arctic, the Atlantic (via Hudson Bay) and the Pacific. Glaciers serve as excellent water storage systems, releasing flow during warm summer months when rivers are at their lowest.
Glacier ice forms when snow falls in cold areas – the poles or at high elevations – where it doesn’t melt. The Columbia Icefield sits at an average elevation of 3,000m, and the surrounding peaks – 3,747-metre Mount Columbia is the Canadian Rockies’ second-highest – attract storm clouds. When enough snow falls on older snow, the accumulated weight presses down on itself, causing snow crystals to morph into ice. Over time, the weight of the glacier pushes it downslope.
The Athabasca, approximately six kilometres long, advances about 15m every year. At the same time however, it is melting back – retreating – 30m annually.
“The key to building an icefield or glacier is quite simple,” Lemieux said. “You need to have more snow falling than melting.”
Like most glaciers around the world, the Athabasca stopped growing decades ago. In 1908, the glacier stretched across the valley floor where the paved Icefield Parkway now lays. Today, the melting rate is accelerating.
“See that big boulder?” said Lemieux, pointing to a freezer-sized rock sitting amidst a field of stones. “It used to be beside the edge of the glacier. It’s moved 100 feet (30m) since last year. People used to ask, is it hard to tell it’s melting? It’s not hard to tell anymore.”
Lemieux began guiding Athabasca tours as a Parks Canada interpreter. When Parks’ cancelled its interpretive hiking program in favour of privatization in the mid-1980s, Lemieux, having recently earned his ACMG assistant ski guide certification (he recently retired from 27 winters of heli-ski guiding with CMH) - recognized an opportunity.
“I had a sense it would be a viable business,” Lemieux said. “Parks was only providing crampons. I thought if we could get people the right footwear, provide them with rain gear, sunscreen, it would fly.”
Slowly, it did. Lemieux employs nine full- and part-time guides. This season’s Ice Walk tours began in late May and will run through early October. The day of our tour, 40 people participated on half- and full-day walks.
We learned how the ice surface becomes dirty as rock dust falls from neighbouring Mounts Athabasca, Andromeda and Snow Dome; how stones melt out pockmarks and pools of various sizes; how the glacier constantly changes as cracks, gullies and icy creeks form, running with water made turquoise by rock flour.
Our six-hour tour granted us time to walk the four kilometres to the broken, jumbled, extraordinary landscape of the lower icefall. Climbers and ski mountaineers navigate around the icefall via its smoother – and narrow - north and south shoulders; direct passage is blocked by ice shelves, arches and towering wedges. Icefalls are created when a glacier drops over steep bedrock, as gravity causes tension and the ice cracks and splits. The features reveal striations created by successive snow layers reminiscent of tree rings.
It’s a fascinatingly beautiful, astonishing and humbling work of nature.
More than one million tourists visit the Athabasca annually, but most don’t see the icefall up close as Brewster’s snow coach tours turn around half-way to that point. For those not capable of hiking, the snowcoach provides an excellent experience. But those who appreciate the Ice Walk are a big part of what’s kept Lemieux running his tours for three decades.
“My clientele tends to be extremely intelligent, well-educated, curious and physically fit. What keeps me going is the variety of people I get to meet on the glacier. And they get jazzed.”
Skirting under the icefall, we returned to the glacier toe along its north flank, which is thicker than the south. Soon we reached a millwell, a circular shaft created by the force of water pouring into it. Millwells can drill right to bedrock, sending water running under the ice all the way to the snout. Falling in one can be fatal, one of the natural hazards that make wandering the glacier unguided dangerous.
In 1998, a young girl from Israel fell into a crevasse near the toe. Lemieux and one of his guides went to help.
“She was small and she went in a couple of metres,” Lemieux recalled. “She was stuck where the crevasses got narrower but it opened wider underneath her and she was close to slipping through. We got our guests in a safe spot and then we lowered a couple of prussic cords with drop loops on them. She was able to grab two of those loops and we yanked her out like pulling a cork out of a bottle.”
Not all who have fallen into a crevasse are so lucky. Lemieux remembers a German doctor who wandered onto the glacier on his own a decade ago who wasn’t pulled out alive. In 2001, a nine-year-old Japanese boy fell through a thin snow bridge and became wedged in a crevasse. Rescuers spent hours trying to extricate him. They did, but it was too late. Last summer one of Lemieux’s guides discovered the body of a solo mountaineer who disappeared in 1995.
Nobody on a guided tour has ever fallen in.
While it’s still unwise for anyone inexperienced in glacier travel to venture onto the ice unguided, significant melting has made the lower tongue too thin for deep crevasses. And that thinness is causing the melting rate to accelerate.
Acknowledging his observations are anecdotal – but in agreement with scientists studying the Athabasca and other glaciers - Lemieux has no doubt that climate change is happening, and that science has proved that human activity has accelerated the effects, including glacial melting.
“I realize now, I have been here for half the years of my life. I’m 62 and this is my 31st year,” Lemieux said. “There’s value in being in one place for an extended period of time. You do see the changes.”
Watching the changes provide another interesting element that will keep him guiding his walks for some years to come.
“It’s still enjoyable. It’s a great place to be, the glacier is really cool and you’re out in the fresh air. I’ve worked with film crews, scientific researchers and curious public. The best compliment I ever got was from a guy who said, ‘you make people who don’t think, think.’
“If I can do that, that’s pretty damn good.”
