Once Upon a Glacier
Today, every steep flank and wind-razored edge of these mountains gleams in the pale winter sun. A bluebird day. Pure white, pure blue. Below, most humans live on three alluvial creek deltas, fanned out into Slocan Lake, a long lean trench deep and cold and clean. Fed by waterfalls amid creeks like blue wrinkles on the topo map of an ancient watchful face, this lake shimmers like the silver which lured thousands to dig here, get rich here, or just die trying here.
Our glacier, downgraded a decade ago to an ice field, looks more like its former self today,
fresh new tons of snow clothe its raw exposed shoulders and mineral-rich throat. The filthy smoke and ash of wildfires are whisked away by the wind and layered and frosted by a giant’s hand. Our son hiked up there once with a posse of boys and two patient guides. They could see their own tiny villages from where their tents were pitched, below the green ice cliffs and grubby seamed snow of the glacier.
It was, his ten year old self told us, just like being an astronaut.
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