Telling It on the Mountain

In Wyoming's Wind River Range, two backcountry skiers scale new heights to save our shrinking glaciers

Living in a place like Wyoming's Wind River Range seems to endow people with an odd mix of alpha intensity and laid-back Deadheadness. Easterners can find this disconcerting. Which is why it comes as a surprise that Forrest and Amy McCarthy -- climbers, guides, and backcountry skiers who have those qualities in spades -- are both transplants from the East. Forrest, who's from Massachusetts, came west to Boy Scout camp as a teenager and fell instantly in love. Amy, a native of upstate New York, came here as a college sophomore to work a summer on a dude ranch. Same reaction. Ten years after they met, Forrest persuaded Amy to marry him.

Both McCarthys are affiliated with the Murie Center, a conservation group in Moose, Wyoming, which takes its name from explorers Olaus and Mardy Murie. The Muries carried out groundbreaking research in Alaska in 1956, leading eventually to the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Amy was the center's director until last year; Forrest joined its 50th-anniversary ANWR expedition in June 2006.

The McCarthys' particular passion is for snow peaks and glaciers, matched only by their concern for the speed with which these are succumbing to global warming. So the nationwide stepitup07 campaign (See Bill McKibben, "Get Up! Stand Up!" OnEarth, Spring 2007) seemed an excellent opportunity to dramatize the problem. The weekend of April 14 saw 1,400 coordinated events in all 50 states. The McCarthys' contribution was to scale the 13,804-foot Gannett Peak, the highest in Wyoming, then ski across the Gooseneck and Dinwoody glaciers. It took four days. At the summit they unfurled a banner made by the Global Warming Hero League, a group of seventh graders from Jackson Hole Middle School. The banner showed the Statue of Liberty drowning in a rising ocean, in line with stepitup's overall theme of highlighting national icons threatened by global warming.

But the ascent of Gannett Peak is not the experience it once was. "This used to be a great snow climb right into August," Forrest laments. "But it's a totally different mountain now. Another two degrees of warming and the glaciers in the Wind River Range, which are the largest concentration in the Rockies, are gone." This is a matter of academic study as well as personal passion: Forrest is earning a master's degree in geography at the University of Wyoming, where he is compiling a database of photographs (going all the way back to 1899) that track changes in landscape and the shrinking of glaciers over time. The Gannett and Dinwoody glaciers have lost more than a third of their surface area in the past decade.

It would seem self-evident, Forrest agrees, that skiers and climbers should feel a natural affinity for wilderness conservation. But that's not always the case. "The business has changed a lot in the last few years," he says, "ever since the Krakauer book came out" -- meaning Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, the best-selling account of a catastrophic 1996 ascent of Everest. "A lot of it now is about who has the fanciest pair of skis or the coolest high-tech altimeter. It gets to feeling a bit like Survivor."

On April 12, undeterred by pessimism, the McCarthys set off up the craggy trail to Gannett Peak. It was Forrest's 15th ascent of the mountain, Amy's seventh. And let's not forget Wister the dog (named for a mountain that was in turn named for the cowboy novelist Owen Wister). This was his fourth time up. "Dogs are more comfortable on snow than any human," Amy says with a grin. "They have built-in crampons."