If you can see Mt. Baker, you are part of The Experience
When Eric Gilbertson climbed Colfax Peak in 2024, it was as straightforward as mountaineering gets in the North Cascades. One year later, it was a different story.
“The bergschrund had melted out so much that it was impassable,” he explains.
The bergschrund, a gap that opens between a glacier and the unmoving rock and snow beyond its terminus, was more than just a hazard. To Gilbertson, it was another example of how climate change is reshaping Washington state’s ice-capped peaks.
Gilbertson, a self-described “mountaineer and peak bagger,” set about trying to explore the highest 100 peaks in Washington state a few years earlier. He discovered that Mount St. Helens had been shrinking and, in 2021, had fallen off the list of the 100 tallest mountains. A surveyor by trade, he began to wonder what other peaks might be changing. In late 2025, Gilbertson and co-authors John T. Abatzoglou, Kathryn E. Stanchak and Scott Hotaling published a new study that gained international attention.
Most of the media coverage focused on the blockbuster discovery that Columbia Crest, the ice-capped summit of Mount Rainier, had lost nearly 20 feet of ice since it was officially measured in 1956. In fact, Columbia Crest was no longer the highest point on the iconic peak; it was an unnamed patch of rock about a hundred yards away.
But Rainier wasn’t the only mountain that Gilbertson studied. In fact, three of the five ice-capped peaks he surveyed were in the North Cascades: Colfax, East Fury and Eldorado Peak. And, like mighty Tahoma, they were all shrinking.
The largest change Gilbertson recorded occurred on East Fury. Accessed via a long hike from Ross Lake, photos of the summit from 1980 show it covered in year-round ice. When Gilbertson surveyed it in 2024, the ice cap was gone, and a rocky summit was the highest point. According to the 2025 study, the mountain lost 30 feet of ice between 1980 and 2022.
“On East Fury, there’s not even a local maximum where the ice summit used to be,” Gilbertson says.
North of the Cascade River Road, Eldorado Peak is such an aesthetic summit that climber and author Fred Beckey coined it “the Queen of the Cascade River.” Like East Fury, it’s no longer ice-capped. According to Gilbertson’s research, it lost more than 20 feet of ice between 1950 and 2024, with 6.2 feet of that loss occurring between 2022 and 2024.
Colfax Peak, one of the sub-summits of the Mount Baker massif, is the lone North Cascade peak to retain its ice-capped status. Between 2007 and 2022, it lost nearly 10 feet of ice. The ice grew a little over the next two years, but declined again in 2025.
“Colfax lost 5 feet last year, where it used to be maybe a foot or holding steady in previous years,” he explains, citing similar findings on Eldorado. “Those [lower elevation peaks] are accelerating, the higher ones aren’t, but I suspect they might start soon.”
To better understand the pace of ice melt, Gilbertson has added ground-penetrating radar to his survey tools. This allows him to measure the amount of ice remaining, which, when combined with the melt rate, can be used to estimate how long it will take for ice-capped peaks to disappear.
“Colfax is going to lose its ice campaign status next year, most likely,” says Gilbertson, referencing currently unpublished data about the peak.
When he began measuring these peaks, Gilbertson used a combination of historical photographs and lidar imagery to establish baselines. Then, he would haul surveying equipment into the alpine to measure the summit elevation in late summer and early fall, when snow and ice cover are lowest.
Initially, the survey kit he borrowed from Seattle University weighed about 20 pounds. He pared it down to an ultralight setup, but with the ground-penetrating radar, the weight climbed up to nearly 100 pounds, depending on the trip.
When he surveyed East Fury in 2025, Gilbertson carried 75 pounds of gear, all on his own. The trip started with a 25-mile hike and only got more complicated.
“I had to fix a line on this fifth-class rock, rope-solo up and then wrap down and then double carry, jugging up the rope with the gear,” he explains. “It was crazy.”
It’s not just ice-capped peaks that are melting out across the North Cascades. In 1971, the United States Geological Survey published an inventory of glaciers in the North Cascades. They recorded 756 glaciers, representing “about half of the glacier area in the United States south of Alaska” between Snoqualmie Pass and the Canadian border.
Some 312 of these were found within North Cascades National Park, where, according to the National Park Service, “glacier area has declined about 53%” since studies began.
For more than 40 years, Mauri Pelto has led the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project, an effort to document and share information on how climate change is affecting the glaciers and alpine environment of the North Cascades. And like Gilbertson, a lot of Pelto’s research involves hiking into remote corners of the North Cascades.
“We don’t look that much different than your average backpacking climbing party going in,” he says. “Instead of climbing ropes and such, we have science equipment.”
Once they get back into the wilderness, their days are spent “marching across the glacier, taking a lot of measurements.”
“That allows us to really experience the glaciers while we’re measuring them,” Pelto says. “We get to observe a lot of things that aren’t just about a measurement of the glacier. You can see changes in alpine vegetation flowering, marmot populations, everything.”
This has given Pelto a front-row seat to the extent of the changes in the alpine environment.
“Glaciers weren’t just thinning the terminus and in the lower half where they’re supposed to thin, but they’re also thinning all the way to the top,” he explains. “That was the cue to me. If you’re thinning at the top, as well as at the bottom, you know you’re not going to survive.”
In response, Pelto developed a method for forecasting glacier survival.
He also keeps a running list of North Cascade glaciers his team has studied that “have now disappeared.” The list contains more than 30 glaciers, and even those not on it are changing quickly.
“When I started the project, there were a number of glaciers in the region that were advancing, or had just finished advancing,” Pelto says. “I knew glaciers were going to disappear, but it wasn’t until about 20 years in that I realized I needed to come up with a mechanism to forecast their survival.”
Since 1984, the glaciers Pelto have been studying most closely have lost an average of 30% of their ice volume. More recently, the pace has been picking up.
“There was a steady retreat until 2005, then the next decade there was definitely an increase,” Pelto said. “Since 2015, it’s accelerated again.”
The increasing melt echoes Gilbertson’s observations on ice-capped peaks. It also supports that alpine environments are warming more rapidly than lower-elevation regions, which is part of why neither Pelto nor Gilbertson has a particularly rosy outlook on the long-term prospects for glaciers and ice-capped peaks in the North Cascades.
“For the North Cascades, you know, you are going to lose all your glaciers,” Pelto says. “It doesn’t really matter about the day the last crystal disappears. It’s more that in about 30 or 40 years there isn’t going to be much left. At that point, there are a few remnants, but they’re not really an important water resource anymore.”
That doesn’t diminish the importance of either Pelto or Gilbertson’s research. In fact, it makes it even more important to help communities and decision-makers understand the implications and to prepare for a warmer, drier North Cascades.
“These ecosystems are built around this late summer supply of plentiful, cool glacier melt,” he explains. “You take that away, and it could be a struggle for anybody who relies on that water.”
In the North Cascades, the list of communities, industries and ecosystems that depend on that water is long.
Pelto points to salmon populations that depend on streamflow and to how alpine lakes will change as streamflow declines and algae thrive in warmer waters. He points to the communities throughout the North Cascades that rely on glacier-fed rivers for clean water.
“If you go over toward the Yakima River area or the Wenatchee area it’s more agriculture that’s going to suffer,” Pelto says. “It’s just difficult to replace this natural buffer of droughts, this natural reservoir that just drains, coincidentally, during the warmest, driest part of the year when we need the water.”
In the Methow Valley, these impacts are already being felt.
The USGS recorded 15 glaciers feeding the Methow River watershed in its 1971 inventory. By 2005, nine remained, and by 2025, only one was left: the Silver Star Glacier. The loss of these glaciers means less water overall in the Methow River and a shift in flow patterns, with an earlier spring freshet and lower flows in late summer. Average flow rates between July and September declined by 40% from 2015 to 2025.
In the absence of a means to halt glacier retreat, conservationists are using beavers to keep water in the system for longer.
“Beavers do a little bit the same thing as glaciers,” Pelto explains. “They don’t increase the amount of water like glaciers do, but they slow down and just kind of trickle out the water during the driest periods of the year, so they can buffer some of the late summer low flow.”
In the Methow, where beavers were extirpated during the fur trade, groups like the Methow Beaver Project have been working on reintroduction. They have also been building beaver-dam analogues that mimic the effects of real beaver dams, both retaining water in the system and promoting habitat changes that support beaver population restoration.
“Beavers aren’t a substitute for areas that have big glaciers, but the Methow had a few small glaciers, so beavers can be an important thing,” Pelto says. “And they used to be in that basin.” X
