A few days ago Anjali and I trekked into the Canadian Rockies to a campsite on the Athabasca River. The water ran swift and silent and a strange chalky blue color. Dust suspended in water, made from glacier grinding against rock miles upstream.
We found our assigned campsite on a patch of riverbank so pristine that we could make out the prints a cougar had left the night before. Our tent stakes entered the silty soil without resistance. Steep ridges rose up on all sides. Millennia ago this valley had been hacked out by the Athabasca Glacier, so immense and muscular that it literally moved mountains. This humble river trickled down the mighty canyon it had created.
I looked around for the source of all that ice. To the southwest I could just make out the Columbia Icefields, where the Athabasca began, and saw isolated patches of ice that had retreated to the tops of the highest peaks. Global warming at work.
One doesn’t require a degree in glaciology to know that when this ice disappears, so will the river, and with it the freshwater that has supplied the towns and farms of central Alberta since…well, since there were towns and farms.
This glacier melt is the freshest, cleanest water on the planet. When it’s gone, what will we drink? Reclaimed ocean water? I felt brine in my throat.
Then I looked down at our bank, covered several feet deep with river sediment, the richest, most fertile soil you can imagine. The river has been dropping so fast that plants haven’t even had time to grow here.
It appears that only a few years ago, our campsite would have been underwater. That’s how fast the river is disappearing. Looking up at the dots of ice, I thought, just a few years left.
I looked around at our placid, majestic scene and had to fight back a sense of alarm. When I return to this campsite in a few years, will there still be a river? Will there be water for us to drink?
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