With the initial chill of fall upon us, I thought it seemed an appropriate time to share 1) ice cave photos from a recent(ish) hiking trip to the Big Four Ice Caves outside Seattle and 2) news that I will soon be trading in my California residency for a Washington one. Yes, after just under a year in Berkeley, I, along with my cat and boyfriend, will be moving to Seattle in November. In anticipation of the move and in the spirit of striking out in exploration, I am sharing these images of my ice cave expedition.
Every year from late summer to October, thousands of eager hikers descend upon Big Four Mountain in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest for a glimpse of said ice caves. Located in the North Cascades mountain range, the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie Forest is home to more glaciers and snow fields like the Big Four than any other national forest in the lower 48 states. These glacial caves form as warm summer winds and melting snow runs down the mountainside, tunneling through narrow channels called avalanche chutes to form gaping caverns of ice.
While the ice caves are undoubtedly the highlight of the hike, the meandering, roughly two-mile trail that leads to the caves abounds with natural beauty. From the trailhead, a boardwalk takes you through a low marshy area with views of blue mountains partially obscured by wetland grasses and old-growth forests.
Continuing across a footbridge over the Stillaguamish River, you make your way up a gentle incline through a dense forest of Pacific silver fir. The trees eventually begin to thin out, offering glimpses of large swathes of snow lying at the base of Big Four Mountain. As the trees grow sparser and the soil less hospitable, low-lying alpine vegetation begin to dominate the landscape, thriving in the rocky terrain.
From this vantage point, the caves look minute in comparison to the dark mountain that recedes behind them, their black mouths dwarfed by the sheer rock face. But as you draw nearer, the mouths widen, stretching open to yawn forth from their icy confines. Coming to the edge of the first cave, its size now calibrated to a human scale, you feel as though it could swallow you whole.
At the caves, you move through an otherworldly landscape, scrambling among treacherous rocks and soiled snow that is encrusted with the dirt of millennia – the entire lifetime of the mountain is preserved here. Through the mist, distant figures take on a ghostly presence, their low voices, muffled by the pregnant air, mingle with the steady dripping of water. In this strange place, you can fool yourself into thinking you’ve materialized onto some faraway ice planet. Craggy formations of snow and rock blanket the surface of this desolate world. A distant mountain, its hulking round form shrouded in thick fog, is some great alien moon.
From inside the cave mouth, color and life from the distant treeline is brought into focus, framed by high walls of scalloped ice. The cave ceiling sores overhead as water droplets rain down from above. Standing in this icy tomb, we are reminded both of the vast grandeur of the natural world and of its fragility and volatility. For as the caves melt and freeze over and thaw again each year, they gradually shift, moving and collapsing over time. Avalanches and melting ice, accelerated by the warming climate, make these cathedrals of ice treacherous indeed.
It is this awesome might of nature embodied in cold beauty that has continually drawn people over the centuries to the most dangerous and inhospitable reaches of the globe. As exploration of the arctic surged in the 19th century, artists attempted to capture the sublimity of these frozen tundras in their paintings and writings. These wild locales live in our imagination as forces conquerable yet unfathomable, holding romantic notions of unattainability and dangerous beauty. It is places like the Big Four Ice Caves that captivate us with their wild and mysterious splendor but remind us that, while we are ultimately at the mercy of nature’s forces, we also have it within our power to either destroy these places of beauty, or to help preserve them.
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