LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan On our sixth day in Canada, we set out for the southernmost tip of Jasper National Park to see one of its biggest attractions: Athabasca Glacier. Athabasca is a 2.5-square-mile “toe” extending from Canada’s Columbia Icefield, the largest ice field in the Rocky Mountains. If you’ve been lucky enough to see a glacier—or, better yet, walk on one—you know it can be a transformative experience. I’ll never forget the glacier calving we witnessed in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park in 2021; I can still hear the ice crashing into the ocean, the thunder of it rattling my bones. But every glacier experience comes with a somber undertone. Because these icy behemoths are disappearing. As wondrous as they are, they're also a stark warning that our world is changing much faster than we’d like to think.
That’s what our morning at Athabasca felt like—a warning. Or really, several warnings rolled into a single moment. Along the pathway leading up to the glacier, colorful signs traced the ice’s retreat over the years. We saw how far the glacier reached in 1884, 1902, 1935. At the sign for 1992, the year we were born, we still couldn't see the foot of the glacier; we had to climb over the next rise and walk a couple hundred yards more. That would have made the experience sobering enough, but two other things hung over our heads. For one, by the time we reached the glacier, we couldn’t see much of it—it was shrouded in smoke. This summer has marked Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, and smoke had been following us for days. On this morning, it blanketed Athabasca’s tongue-like shape, as if the Columbia Icefield had just worked its way through a thousand packs of Marlboros. For another, while inhaling smoke at the foot of the glacier, we had home on our minds. Tropical Storm Hilary—cooked up by both natural and human-caused factors—was barreling toward our families in Southern California, the first such storm to make landfall in our home state in 84 years. Fortunately, the storm wouldn’t hit our families as hard as we’d feared. But squinting through the haze shrouding Athabasca, I still felt my gut twisting. A melting glacier. Raging wildfires. And a surprise tropical storm. It felt like the planet was screaming. It's not lost on me that we're contributing to climate change by embarking on The Big Trip. Assuming we successfully complete our route, we'll have driven about 80,000 miles by November 2024. That's a lot driving, and a lot of emissions. Especially when you consider how many of those miles involve towing. I don't have a justification for that. I can't say, "But we're making up for it by doing this." Our truck's hybrid engine produces fewer emissions during the average drive, sure, but not while we're towing. We can and will look into carbon offsets, but there's no question that offsetting one's carbon footprint pales in comparison to reducing emissions in the first place. That said, in one very, very small way, I think our visit to Athabasca was a step in the right direction. Before The Big Trip, it was so easy to ignore my impact on the environment. I had so many distractions to hold my attention elsewhere: work, my commute, buying groceries, washing dishes, etc. I had almost no sense of how much water I used each day or how much trash I was tossing into the dumpster. And I only thought about my emissions on hot, stuffy days, when smog collected in the air and turned the horizon into a murky brown haze. It's different now. Now, because we boondock so often, we have to ration our water and keep an ongoing mental log of how much we use. We pack out our garbage. And every day, we see how our emissions are reshaping the natural world, breaking down delicate ecosystems. We can't ignore our impact anymore. At Athabasca, one of the informational signs presented visitors with a question: What can you do about climate change? It's about time I found out.
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