Saint Mary's Glacier

It went really well, and everyone was kind of hyped up, and we were going to Idaho Springs that day to go ziplining.

We're getting all geared up to go ziplining, and the guy was like, 30 minute delay there's lightning so they pulled everyone off the course and you know we're kind of sitting around 30 minutes go by he comes back and he's got bad news he's like you guys can't go out today and we you know we had drove an hour hour and a half into the mountains they're like what do we do and assistant coach tom green he's from colorado he's like why i grew up like 45 minutes from here, St. Mary's Glacier area.

He's like, why don't we go up there? So we took these big bands like further into the mountains and we get to where he kind of grew up at and we hike up this like kind of decent hike and there's like a beautiful lake.

People are there swimming, cliff jumping.

So, these things are off...

So I mean, St. Mary's Glacier is gone.

Yeah, I was gonna say.

We have disappearing glaciers.

Check out the show notes for a link to a more detailed list of these locations.

And finally, if there's one thing you should read in this week's paper, it's reporter Wes Eisenhardt's piece on the extinction of St. Mary's Glacier.

Earlier this summer, the millennium's old ice field just outside of Idaho Springs succumbed to last winter's abnormally high temperatures and low snowpack.

This is incredible.

St. Mary's Glacier has melted for what seems to be the first time ever.

Colorado's hottest summer on record did that to it.

On the left side, this is what year-round snow field near Idaho Springs typically looks like in the summer.

Mm-hmm.

So I went up to St. Mary's Glacier with my friend, Manda.

We did our hike, we were driving back down, and we were trying to figure out where we wanted to go eat food after.

And we had Winston with me and so we were like, "We have to go somewhere dog friendly." And I, so I was like, "Let's go to Tennyson and just like walk around.

Well, one of the real challenges we're facing is the reality of climate change.

You look at it, this year was the first year St. Mary's Glacier disappeared.

That is real.

That's a real change in the climate.

Well, the inconvenient truth is that Al Gore was right.

And so just remember when he started raising the alarm about climate change, and everyone was like, "Oh, no, there's no such thing as climate change" and blah, blah, blah, and it's just cyclical and all that.

Now you have St. Mary's Glacier, like you mentioned, melting.

You have glaciers all over the world melting.

Perez-Esquivel.

St. Mary's Glacier is one of those great near-Denver getaways.

It's an easy place to take an out-of-town friend or a family member to give them a taste of that Rocky Mountain grandeur.

I've done this hike twice.

St. Mary's and other permanent snowfields in Colorado survive less on direct snowfall than on avalanches, which roll down and pack in on them.

So if we get a real boomer of a winter this year...

September 2027, yeah, people might be skiing at St. Mary's Glacier this time of year.

But if you fast forward a decade, we'll have September snow at St. Mary's fewer and fewer years, most likely.