Places like Emerald Lake in British Columbia, pictured in a Photochrom print from 1902, are home to some of Canada’s largest and most dramatic glacial valleys.Detroit Photographic Co.
Sam Anderson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Environmental Science at Simon Fraser University.
Sit with me by one of the season’s last campfires and feel the dependable transformative magic that comes with the end of summer. The night air wears a new freshness, and mornings shift from the smell of fresh cut grass to the sound of school buses. Here, you can reflect on a season of adventure and outings as you anticipate the year ahead.
In our era of climate crisis, summer’s close is also tinted by a new uncomfortable regularity: the arrival of swaths of data that reflect once again our precarious place in the natural world. Wildfires are waking earlier and burning further, faster and hotter; heatwaves are coming more frequently and with greater ferocity; glaciers in the Rockies and around the world can only melt, and melt, and melt.
This year, as with nearly all years in my lifetime, we will see another step toward mountains that look less and less familiar as glaciers shrink in number and size. If you feel like you’ve heard that before, it’s because you have: Part of the maddening cycle of climate change is the series of studies and news articles that demonstrate how glacier ice is rapidly disappearing, year after year, and yet it can feel as though all we can do is bear witness to their demise.
When we talk about glaciers, we so often talk about loss: of ice, of water security, and of beautiful places. Yet there is also a memory, a legacy, that comes from this loss.
In death, glaciers leave behind vast valleys that they carved out in life. Active glaciers flow like honey down mountainsides, carving and shaping the stone as they erode mountains over millenniums. Like the imprint made by dragging your finger through a sandy beach, these valleys have a characteristic U-shape, with broad bottoms, steep sidewalls and elongated form. When glaciers retreat, the once-filled valleys are left empty. Given time, streams begin to meander and braid, bringing sediment and lakes and life on the valley floor, while mosses give way to meadows and forest.
These valleys are as familiar as they are critical to Canadians – if you’ve ever driven to Banff on Highway 1, or to Vancouver on the Coquihalla, you have travelled through some of the country’s largest and most dramatic glacial valleys. From the sharp peaks to the smooth lakes to the highways that offer safe passage, the story of these valleys is just as much the story of the glaciers that once were.
In places like these, there is no ice to be seen, but its presence is felt in both the broadest strokes and the finest details. Ice carved the soaring jagged peaks that hold these valleys like cupped hands; ice smoothed the bottom of these basins, which allowed for meadow to mingle with the gentle meandering streams; ice carved basins for lakes to fill, scoured stones for mosses to soften, made room for marmots to play. The sparkle of the braided turquoise flow as it pools and dips and eddies is as glacial as the rustling of leaves when a warm breeze passes down the valley: neither would exist if not for the ice that was. Together, the sum of the details felt in places like this outline the silhouette of what used to be, and even though there is not ice here any more, we can still connect with and learn from the ice that was. Its loss left a place to be.
I loved spending time with my dad in places like these. Here, the joys were simple: skipping stones, telling jokes, having picnic lunches. Dad’s love of life drew him to these places, and his love of sharing experiences brought us together in them. Be it a road trip through the Rockies or a simple afternoon walk in our neighbourhood, we found happiness in wandering these paths together.
His recent passing was sudden and unexpected. If you have lived through loss, we share a grief. As a newcomer to this world, I’ve learned that life after loss is a strange landscape that grows more familiar only by wandering through it.
These past months, I have spent so much of my time in the places my dad loved, working with family to heal and find footing in this new and unfamiliar dynamic. In taking care of the tasks that come with loss, and in navigating the hidden bureaucracies of bereavement, I’ve been surprised by a new kind of closeness with my dad as I sit surrounded by the minutiae of his life. In searching for important e-mails, I found his e-mail subscriptions, and could see the day-to-day pieces that brought him excitement and joy: travel suggestions for adventures across Canada; recipes to try; notices about new music from his favourite artists. His apps, his office, his photos: These things that remain reflect what he found important in the world, and how he chose to navigate his days. I sat where he had sat and I read what he would read, and I savoured a surprising feeling of connection. I have found that I can still learn from him as I see daily life through his eyes, and I can see his silhouette outlined by that which surrounded the life he’d left behind. His loss, in short, left a place to be.
My dad’s death has left a valley in my life: not a void, but a place to sit, to wander, to visit and revisit, a place where I can see the shape of his life in the broadest strokes and the finest details. Like the glaciers that painted the mountain ranges with their passing, I can be in those meadows and connect with my dad as I look around and see the shape of his life reflected in everything around me. I can wander the valleys of his life as I carve out the valleys of mine.