Updated September 19, 2026
I am hiking alongside several fellow seven-year-olds up a rocky gully below a scorching summer sun. We turn a bend, and suddenly, a marvel of Mother Nature comes into view: a massive expanse of gleaming snow and ice that, despite the heat, stretches on and on. We sprint toward the slushy oasis, and some kids begin pelting each other with snowballs. I reach into my pack, pull out a plastic garbage bag, and then slide down the snowy expanse, my hoots and hollers of pure kid glee echoing off a nearby ridge.
This faded memory from 1988 popped into my mind this week as I read the dismal news from Colorado’s Front Range. St. Mary’s Glacier, a cornerstone of my childhood summers and the site of this joyous recollection, melted into a puddle for the first time in recorded history.
For those unfamiliar with St. Mary’s Glacier, a quick primer. No, it’s not technically a glacier, but instead a year-round snowfield. It’s the closest such feature to the Denver metro area, just 45 minutes from nearby Golden. Victorian-era city dwellers hiked up to it to escape the summer heat more than a century ago. During my lifetime, it’s been a destination for local summer camps and school field trips. And it’s the place where dedicated Front Range skiers go to in July, August, and September to carve the few slushy turns that grant them year-round skier status.
And now, it’s gone.
To be fair, Coloradans have long known that St. Mary’s Glacier was on life support. Across the globe, the warming climate continues to do to glaciers what a hair dryer might to an ice cube. Summertime photographs of St. Mary’s—this one from 2014, or this one from 2016—have showcased its rapid retreat.
The steady decline of these high-altitude features has been monitored for years by scientists, conservationists, and outdoor enthusiasts alike. Yet, witnessing the complete disappearance of a landmark that has defined a region’s summer culture for generations marks a sobering milestone in the changing environmental landscape of the American West. For decades, the permanent snowfield served as an accessible glacial experience for thousands of visitors who did not have to venture deep into the remote wilderness to witness enduring alpine ice. Its proximity to the densely populated Front Range corridor made it a unique educational resource and a beloved natural playground, bridging the gap between urban life and high-alpine environments.
All it took to send St. Mary’s Glacier to a watery grave was the wrong combination of climate and weather, which is what Colorado experienced over the past 12 months. The region suffered through the worst winter snowpack in 40 years, which was immediately followed by the hottest summer anyone in the area can remember. The cumulative effect of these compounding factors proved to be too much for the resilient but overburdened snowfield to endure.
“It was not surprising that St. Mary’s melted out,” Dan McGrath, a professor of geosciences at Colorado State University, told me. “The last year has highlighted just how sensitive Colorado’s glaciers and snowfields are to climate.”
McGrath is a glacier expert, and he studies the retreat of Colorado’s glaciers—especially those along the Front Range. He and his team use aerial Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) imagery alongside the conservation group LightHawk to map the size and shape of glaciers, which has allowed them to chart their annual wintertime growth and summer shrinkage with remarkable precision.
“All of these glaciers are on a one-way street to their eventual disappearance,” he said. “The rate of melting is variable. Some years you may see them only thin by a few inches, but the overall trend is one-way.”
Yes, glaciers and snowfields expand greatly in the winter as wind and avalanches deposit snow in shaded gullies and cirques. St. Mary’s Glacier sits in a deep drainage that blocks out direct sunlight for much of the year, providing a natural shield during the harsher months. But then, when the heat of summer arrives, the period of shrinking begins, and the ice is forced to fight a defensive battle against rising ambient temperatures and intense solar radiation.
McGrath points to his research at nearby Andrews Glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park to illustrate the contemporary dynamics that killed St. Mary’s. Between 2010 and 2020, Andrews Glacier lost about six inches of thickness each year. From 2020 to 2024, that accelerated to 3 feet annually. Then came the brutal winter of 2025-26.
“We just crunched the numbers, and it thinned by 11 feet,” McGrath said. “That’s a three-times increase in just one year.”
The staggering acceleration in thinning rates across the region underscores the compounding pressures facing high-altitude ice. While Andrews Glacier managed to survive this unprecedented period of warmth, other historic features have not fared as well. The Arapahoe Glacier, which dominates the skyline above Boulder, is barely hanging on by a thread. Isabelle Glacier, situated near Brainard Lake State Park, is now reduced to a few scattered patches of crusty brown ice, bearing little resemblance to the robust glacial bodies mapped by early cartographers and explorers.
But St. Mary’s Glacier, and its century of history, is toast.
So, could St. Mary’s Glacier ever return? Sure, McGrath says, since Mother Nature will still send winter snowstorms and ice tumbling into the sheltered gully. But it will never be what it once was. He likened the glacier’s future to that of a savings account maintained by someone with a severe shopping addiction, where continuous withdrawals far outpace any sporadic deposits.
“With Saint Mary’s, the savings account has been drawn down and depleted,” he said. “You could rebuild it for one year, sure. But it will take many years of saving to build it back to what it once was.”
And given the persistent trend of hotter summers across the American West, that kind of sustained accumulation is increasingly unlikely to happen. The systemic shift in seasonal temperatures means that any snowpack preserved during the winter months faces an uphill battle of unprecedented proportions as soon as the warmer seasons set in.
Science, of course, has a way of viewing these dynamics through a dispassionate lens. Glacier retreat is happening across the globe, causing rising sea levels, dangerous avalanches, and catastrophic floods in vulnerable mountain communities worldwide. We all know why these changes are occurring, even if not everyone wants to acknowledge the broader anthropogenic drivers behind them. Scientists are there to measure the losses, report the findings, and try to analyze what is to come for ecosystems that rely on glacial meltwater and alpine stability.
But even McGrath understands the profound emotion that I and, no doubt, thousands of other Coloradans felt when we read the news and saw the eye-popping images of the rocky puddle where St. Mary’s Glacier once stood.
“It’s been a part of the culture of Colorado for decades,” he said. “From a recreation perspective, from an identity of Colorado perspective, it’s really significant.”
Those gleeful summer camp hikes. The goofy mid-August sessions on rock skis. The impromptu snowball fights in July. The simple, carefree joy of sledding down ancient ice in the dead of summer. They are gone now, reduced to fading memories of the way things used to be.
