Rocketing boulders, dwindling streams: signs of WA's shriveling glaciers

Zack McGill was guiding a group of climbers down from the icy summit of Washington’s Mount Baker when he saw something few have seen: torso-sized boulders rocketing down the mountain at about 40 miles an hour.

“They were gaining enough speed on the bare ice to bounce high in the air and clear the large crevasses at the base of the Roman Wall and continue down the Deming [Glacier],” said McGill, a mountain guide with Cascade Mountain Ascents in Bellingham, by email.

McGill said the rock projectiles fell about 2,000 vertical feet before disappearing in crevasses or slowing to a stop on the surface of the ice.

As a warming climate shrinks the rivers of ice atop Mount Baker and other mountains around the world, it’s exposing rock faces and cliffs that haven’t seen daylight for millennia.

“The overhead hazard, from rockfall from the melting out of the ice completely to dirt on the upper mountain is INSANE,” McGill said. "It's been getting worse every year I've been here, but this year is just crazy.”