The Good Rain - Blue Glacier and Mount Olympus

This was my first guided trek with Alpine Ascents.

The approach along the Hoh River, fed by glacial melt, meandering through old growth temperate rainforest, build the anticipation for everything that follows. Flat, long, ancient — old growth Douglas fir and Sitka spruce filtering what little light makes it through, the river running alongside, moss on everything. It’s the kind of trail that asks nothing of your legs and the river beckons.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I found a pool of glacial meltwater clear enough to see the bottom and cold enough to make your chest lock up when you stepped in. I swam in it anyway. That kind of cold has a way of resetting things.

Upon reaching our base camp the bugs were relentless, we barely left our tents.

The Blue Glacier

Then we came over the moraine and saw it.

I’ve seen many glaciers before — glimpsed from a distance they usually appear as a smear of white on a dark mountainside. The Blue Glacier is something different. It fills the basin below the summit like it owns the place, and from the top of the moraine you can see the full sweep of it: crevassed, deeply blue in the shadows, enormous yet so obviously receding in a way that takes a moment to register. The colour in particular — that deep glacial blue that only exists where ice has been compressed for centuries — is unlike anything I’d seen in my life.

The moraine itself was a different kind of spectacle. We carefully climbed down the loose, shredded rock carved from the earth by the glacier’s retreat — you can see exactly how far it used to extend, the scraped and striated walls on either side marking the old edges. It’s beautiful in the way that evidence of slow catastrophe can be beautiful. Hard to look at for too long.

The Summit

We went for the summit in worsening conditions. The snow above the glacier was deep and soft. Progress was slow and exhausting and the rain came in properly about halfway up. Visibility closed down to maybe twenty meters. The clouds sat on everything and I was grateful for our guide Gottlieb, who post-holed our path knee-deep, dragging each leg back out before the next one.

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The Attempt

Our plan had been to camp five miles further in, dry off, get a few hours of sleep, and push to the summit in the morning. The problem was that by the time we were in that rain, everything was soaked. Not damp — soaked. Bags, layers, sleeping kit. There was no version of making camp in that that ended well.

We turned around. Made the decision cleanly, without a lot of debate. Sometimes the mountain just says no and the right response is to say okay.

The March Back

What followed was a death march. Back across the glacier, back down the moraine, back through the rainforest in the dark. The Hoh River Trail in the middle of the night with wet boots and a headlamp is a long, long trail. We made it to the car park just before midnight.

There’s a 24-hour burger joint in Port Angeles. I don’t remember the name. I remember that I ate a double cheeseburger at one in the morning in soaking wet clothes at a table by myself while my boots dried out slightly on the floor, and that it was one of the better meals of my life.

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The Blue Glacier is worth the trip on its own terms. The summit will be there another time, in better conditions, with a drier sleeping bag. Some trips are about the objective. This one turned out to be about a glacier at the end of a rainforest, and a swim in water so cold it took your breath away, and getting back to the car.

That’s enough.