Glacierless Peak? The icy realms of Washington’s North Cascades lose their cool

The ice fields that give Washington’s Glacier Peak its name are disappearing, though few people may have noticed.

Glacier Peak, the 10,541-foot high point of Snohomish County, is sometimes called Washington’s forgotten volcano.

Unlike the icy white cones of Mount Rainier or Mount Baker, Glacier Peak is hard to see from the population centers of the I-5 corridor. While it stands nearly as tall as Baker, Glacier is surrounded by other jagged peaks of the North Cascades.

“It is visibly less glaciated,” said glacier researcher Mauri Pelto. “At least a third of the area of glaciers is gone.”

Since July, the 6-million-acre Glacier Peak Wilderness has been in extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Statewide, the summer of 2025 (June-August) was the fourth-warmest and the seventh-driest since 1895, according to climatologist Jacob Genuise with the Washington State Climate Office.

The long, dry summer has eliminated much of the blanket of snow that usually shields Glacier’s glaciers.

“Below 8,000 feet, everything is just rock or bare ice,” said Pelto.

The North Cascade Range is home to nearly 100 named glaciers, more than any other area of the United States outside Alaska, with 15 near Glacier Peak.

A warming climate, and hotter summers in particular, have eaten away at the ice realms of the North Cascades. Pelto said the past five summers have eliminated exceptionally large volumes of ice.

“We're just watching, essentially, the collapse of the glacier system,” Pelto said. “The change has been so fast.”

Glacier Peak is trending to be essentially glacierless within 50 years, according to Pelto.

“Maybe you could end up with just a small little avalanche-fed glacier right near the summit,” he said.

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No roads approach Glacier Peak, making it difficult to visit or see up close, even for neighbors who consider it sacred land.

“You can’t really see it,” said Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe historic preservation officer Mary Porter. “You have to go up the highway a little bit.”

The small tribe with 314 members has a 19-acre reservation outside of Darrington.

Porter said the tribe identifies more strongly with another glaciated peak. It looms over Darrington.

“So-bahli-alhi -- that's Whitehorse Mountain -- is our main relative that we descend from,” Porter said. “We have a lot of real interesting stories associated with these mountains, especially so-bahli-alhi.”

The tribe knows Glacier Peak as tda-ko-buh-ba in the Lushootseed language.

“That place is a sacred place for our mountain goats,” Porter said.

“All these glaciers around us are habitat for the mountain goats, and without the mountain goats and without the salmon, we wouldn't exist,” she said. “Our destiny is tied to the salmon and the mountain goats.”

As the overlooked ice of Glacier Peak dwindles, ecosystems and people downstream have started to feel the effects.

Sauk-Suiattle officials say they’ve noticed low flows in August in the tribe’s key fishing rivers.

“Because I'm a fisherman, I do know that the Cascade River, where we fish, is extremely low,” Porter said. “It's a little disturbing to see.”

Sauk-Suiattle fish program manager Grant Kirby said the Sauk River is low enough to prevent Chinook salmon from entering some creeks above it.

“There's no way that those fish can move up into the spawning grounds,” Kirby said.

“We’re more worried than ever as every year goes by,” said Scott Schuyler, policy representative and elder with the neighboring Upper Skagit Indian Tribe. “We’ve been very fortunate that our glaciers are still intact, but they are diminishing.”

In Whatcom County, heat-loving bacteria killed most of the Chinook salmon in the South Fork Nooksack River, a non-glacial river, in 2021. No dieoffs were reported in the Nooksack’s glacier-fed North and Middle forks.

RELATED: Heat-loving bacteria kill thousands of Washington salmon

“The writing’s on the wall,” Schuyler said. “It’s only a matter of time before something like that happens here.”

The White Chuck River tumbles west from Glacier Peak. In summer, the river looks like gushing chocolate milk.

The opaque water isn't polluted. Runoff from the river’s headwater glaciers carries fine sediment gouged from the mountain over the millennia.

All that silty glacial runoff keeps rivers like the White Chuck flowing and cool even after a long summer drought. In late August, most water in the White Chuck River is glacial melt.

That frigid water flows into the Sauk River, then into the Skagit, Puget Sound’s biggest producer of salmon.

But around the Northwest and around the world, the benefits that glaciers provide are going away.

“The amount of water in the White Chuck River is declining, particularly late in the summer,” Pelto said.

Pelto, a professor of environmental science at Nichols College in Massachusetts, has been studying the glaciers of the North Cascades for 42 years. Every summer, he straps on crampons and skis to document the region’s retreating ice.

“The first time I was on the White Chuck Glacier in the 1980s, it was a beautiful ski, probably a mile-long ski,” Pelto said.

Now, he said, there's no snow or ice anywhere along that one-mile ski run.

“Instead of this big, huge ice cube sitting there melting every day, all summer long, you just have bare rock yielding no runoff.”

A century earlier, mountaineers Claude Rusk and Adelbert Cool traversed a much larger White Chuck Glacier.

“For two hours we battled with crevasses, with 60 feet of rope between us,” Rusk wrote in 1906 in the Spokane Spokesman-Review. “In places these cracks were so wide that we had to work into them and up the opposite sides, cutting steps with a small ax.”

Rusk called Glacier Peak “ice king of the northern Cascades.”

In 2024, Tacoma mountaineer Jason Hummel crossed a much-diminished White Chuck Glacier on his way to the summit of Glacier Peak.

“Mountains change, they evolve, but in some sad way they had grown old before my eyes,” Hummel wrote after that expedition. “A titan of ice whose crown had cracked.”

Pelto said he expects the White Chuck Glacier, one of four that feed the White Chuck River, to be gone in 20 years, with neighboring glaciers not far behind, given the rapid heating of the Earth’s climate by emissions from fossil fuel burning.

“I just don't see any of the glaciers on Glacier Peak that really can survive,” Pelto said.

Glacier’s biggest icefields advanced in the mid-20th century, then began a retreat that has been accelerating in the 21st century.

In 2025, all of Washington state has been experiencing drought, with 80% of the state in severe or extreme drought. Reservoirs on both sides of the Cascades are well below normal summer levels.

“It's not the worst year that we've had in the last 20 years, but it is one of the warmer and lower-flow years,” said Chad Brown with the Washington Department of Ecology.

Salmon and other aquatic creatures need cool water. State regulators treat abnormally warm water as a kind of pollution.

“When you have a very warm summer matched with lower flows that come out of the mountains, you can have much more dire issues with temperature in the water bodies,” Brown said.

When a stream warms beyond state standards, officials aim to cool it back down. Usually that means devising a plan for more shade.

“The goal is to have the highest, tallest vegetation as possible,” Brown said. “But even shrubs can help.”

RELATED: Climate pollution surges in Washington state after pandemic lull

The fossil-fuel pollution that is overheating the whole planet has proved harder to control.

Glacier researchers all over the world see the impacts in melting ice.

“The same thing's happening in New Zealand. It's happening in the Alps. It's happening in the Andes, Alaska, British Columbia,” Pelto said. “So it's the same story everywhere. So it is a global warming.”

On a warm August morning in the White Chuck River, at least one adult salmon swam invisibly in the cloudy, glacial water. Only its triangular dorsal fin poked above the surface from time to time before disappearing into the chocolate milk again.

Salmon in Washington’s drought-stricken rivers have to hold on for perhaps another few weeks before autumn rains return to help rivers rise and water temperatures fall to levels salmon can thrive in.