Mountain Ice, pt. 2

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Three weeks ago my girlfriend Jen and I left our worksite deep in the Wind River Range and began a two day trek back to our apartment. We followed a route I took in 2010 which, though tedious at times, I remembered with original excitement. What it felt like to connect vast wilderness to my bedroom door, one step at a time.

We spent the entire day in thin light, steady wind, linking great blocks of high plateau. Goat Flat, No Man’s Pass, Downs Mountain. Come mid-afternoon we were miles—and several difficult scrambles—past the last scrubby patches of timberline. We tipped our high point for the trip at 13,349’ and descended towards a long ice field called the Continental Glacier. For millions of years snow swirling in from the west has lost velocity against this windbreak and collected in the lee. Draping the Continental Divide for nearly two miles the glacier achieves impressive size because the great backbone of the West is mercifully broad in this northern part of the range taking the form of a shallow rolling scoop. So we were permitted to travel, if slowly, at least without the use of our hands.

Out on the expanse of glacier we hopped across rivulets of slush and circumvented shallow ponds of candy blue meltwater. Picking a point to aim towards in a nearly featureless landscape we noticed something unusual on the opposite edge of the ice. Something I didn’t see four years earlier: a black mat of organic material emerging from the perimeter of retreating ice. Looking as exciting as mud I’d read just enough recently to wonder if it could be something special.

Great temperature fluctuations have changed the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem many times. In the short time humans have occupied this region there have been frigid periods of spreading glaciation as well as droughts lasting over a century. There was a period of time that more of Yellowstone lake evaporated beneath a beating sun than was replenished by precipitation, and it shrunk into its bed without an outlet, concentrating minerals. No Yellowstone River. Trees would have found refuge at higher elevations, on north slopes, perhaps in areas occupied by glaciers and lakes today. I fancied we were approaching a prehistoric forest floor; tree stumps and all. Slowly the confounding band of black, a sunlight-gulping darkness between snow and rock, grew closer.

On closer inspection the deposit offered no secrets. The smell of a tidal flat, dankness and decay, seasoned the breeze. Curiosity waned and the day felt long. I found the smell nauseating. We wound our way toward a small summit, one of three that mark the high divide. I call them ‘the Molehills’ though each commands a unique and soaring view off its own aspect of the massif. Forest fires smudged the scenery and we descended in silence.

Again working our way north we sought out the black, sometimes fibrous, patches of material to soften our footfalls and ease our knees. I wove around searching for clearer evidence of a leaf stem or wood grain. One handful resembled a scramble of insect parts. Other areas could only be described as muck.

Finally, we arrived at a broad fold in the slope, and there was the answer unmistakable: grasshoppers. Pea sized crania with vacant eye sockets collected like heavy graupel. Saw-toothed legs knitted into terraces along a rivulets path. Freshly exposed by the melting ice, insect parts lined the glacier’s edge in a bank inches thick, dozens of feet wide, and hundreds of feet long. Looking north, intermittent patches continued for the length of the glacier. Slowly we resumed our walk in disbelief, stopping to hunch over the ongoing ground cover of disassembled exoskeleton, and concluded these sprawling deposits might just be composed entirely of grasshoppers.

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In a small way I could have prepared myself for this puzzle. Growing up in Montana I learned that Grasshopper Glacier is the body of ice collected in a north-facing cirque of that state’s highest mountain, Granite Peak. I later learned of another Grasshopper Glacier just northwest of the Beartooths in the Crazy Mountains. And after I came to Wyoming, I learned of a third Grasshopper Glacier, a great mass just south along the Continental Divide from our discovery. Someone told me that grasshoppers had been found in these places. Who knows when or where. Small flying insects are common enough in the ice, I thought. I couldn’t have dreamed of anything on the scale we saw up there.

Since this shocking spectacle I’ve done some overdue reading about the Rocky Mountain locust. Not unlike the passenger pidgeon, which once blotted sunlight from the mid-Western homesteaders unobstructed dome of sky and never will again, the only locust native to North America crashed to extinction in a fall that simply cannot be exaggerated.

Locusts are a phase of grasshopper, not a separate species. Also called the gregarious, as opposed to the solitary phase of Melanopus spretus, Rocky Mountain locusts occurred when a mess of hoppers bumped legs and started feeling crowded. Their agitated legs triggered a serotonin gush (one pictures a pulsating mob at a music festival), colors changed, and they’d take to the wing like a single amorphous organism. Lemmings are often parodied for their propensity to go and hurtle off a cliff; this dispersal method is similar. Individual lives are expendable to the swarm when the entire population is on the cusp of depleting prime habitat… I wonder if a similar instinctual imperative explains why Jen and I so often find ourselves in such remote territory.

Western settlers witnessed a swarm of Rocky Mountain Locust in 1875 later estimated to weigh 27.5 million tons. Flying insects, wings clacking legs groping and mandibles gnashing, spread over nearly two hundred thousand square miles. In less than three decades the species was extirpated. Already, the ecology of the great American long grass prairie had been disrailed by the plow. Enough to ensure this phenomena was never repeated.

Like the original swarms of Rocky Mountain Locust, so all-consuming and yet so easily annihilated by a freezing jet stream or a culture of grain growers, this encore appearance of an American native will not last long. Like all Rocky Mountain glaicers the Continental Glacier is retreating rapidly. No sooner does it uncover historic locusts, the locusts begin to decompose. Recently uncovered specimens are well-preserved and as the ice continues to shrink they rapidly transform into a spongy covering that’s every bit as exciting as mud. Already these taxonomic artifacts have rotted beyond detection from their most famous burial ground under Granite Peak; I am lucky to have encountered this grotesque ephemera at all. The skin-crawling scale, the stench, and the goop on my boots will have to be my proxies for that unsettling force of nature removed from the world long before I inhabited it. A rare privilege, this zoomed-out angle on existence and humbling juxtaposition of beauty and death. All reminders why I seek the company of our wild lands.

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