The Illecillewaet Glacier covered 9.3 square kilometres in 1850.   By 1978, it was reduced to 6.8 sq. km.   It is still shrinking and most of the loss is in the tongues of ice that stretch from the neve on top down into the valleys.   When the railway was completed in 1885, tourists and climbers came to Rogers Pass to see the rock and ice.   By 1888, Glacier House was built and a hike to the Great Glacier (Illecillewaet) was part of the guided tour of the area.   The hike to the toe of the glacier was shorter than it is now.   Glaciologists have done field studies and have provide coordinates for the retreat of the toe (provided by Parks Canada):

• 1887 – N51 15.144 W117 28.289 – 1438m
• 1898 – N51 14.988 W117 28.175 – 1550m
• 2011 – N51 14.536 W117 27.483 – 1963m

When Glacier House was open, visitors could hike up to the toe in an hour.   Today, we hike to the end of the trail, just past the 1887 toe, and we can no longer see the ice.   It takes a steep scramble up the rock for another hour to get to the glacier.     At the end of the trail, streams cascade down the rock to the valley.  

The toe of the glacier is now high up the valley, a claw coming down from the neve above.   It is hard scramble up to the toe now and the rock is slick, not sutiable for wet conditions.   Once, on the way down I was alone and hit by a hailstorm.   Much of that downclimb was painfully slow and my shorts were never the same again from a lot of bum-slides.  

Even if you can't scramble up to the toe, the Great Glacier trail will still capture your spirit.   We cross Asulkan Brook and wind through cedar-hemlock forest to a slide of giant boulders.   We wind through the trees and over-sized rocks to the fast-moving, silt-laden waters of the Illecillewaet River, just in its first descent from the meltwaters above.    We look up and even farther up at Mt. Sir Donald, Vaux Glacier, and Mt. Uto.   The valley opens up and we hear rushing water everywhere.   The trail ends at one of many streams from the glacier above, at the upper limit of the treeline and everywhere above has been carved and shaped by ice.   Scramble out onto the rock to feel the ice-shaved slabs.

This hike doesn't go to the top of any hill, nor even to the best viewpoint, but it is a trip back in geological time, a passage to an environment newly freed from the ice, raw, primal, and fresh.   We choose to follow the retreat of the ice each year, hearing the flow of water, seeing the growth of new plants, witnessing the carved rock, smelling and sensing the potential of new life.