Losing Arapaho

In search of Colorado’s last alpine glacier.

A 1919 photograph of Arapaho Glacier by Junius Henderson. Image courtesy of the Glacier Photograph Collection, Rare and Distinctive Collections, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries.

Wind swept across the mountains and a bitter chill hung in the air. Snow blanketed the landscape, having fallen overnight. Six of us trudged through it single file, heads down, stumbling occasionally in the gales. Above us, clouds sped, blanketing the stone walls and peaks of the Continental Divide. Below us, the North Fork of Middle Boulder Creek flowed eastward through a U-shaped valley, from its headwaters to the reservoirs of Boulder, Colorado, 20 miles away.

It was August, but the chilled conditions were typical of an altitude of 13,000 feet in the Rockies. Our destination lay above, at Arapaho Saddle, where we hoped to get a view of an alpine glacier tucked in a cirque between two peaks. Not just any glacier though: Arapaho Glacier is the largest and, as some would say, the last alpine glacier in the state of Colorado.

Ahead of me hiked Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Earth Science and Observation Center. Beside Scambos was Mike MacFerrin, a research glaciologist at the university who specializes in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Next to him strode Gabi Collao Barrios, a postdoctoral researcher in Scambos’s lab who studies snowpack changes in the Rocky Mountains and ice flow dynamics in Antarctica. To her left was Naomi Ochwat, a PhD student in…