Climate change altering the face of Canadian mountaineering

The Abbot Pass hut stood for decades in a rugged saddle between two iconic peaks, overlooking the limpid turquoise of Banff National Park's Lake Louise — a destination for alpinists from around the world until the ground melted beneath it and forced its closure.

"In places the ice is gone and there's nothing but rotten rock left. What used to be nice mellow glacier runs are now really crevassed." Hanly's paper combines 6,283 trip reports left by alpinists in the Abbot Pass hut log with those in a modern climbers database. It covers from 1923 to 2024. The threats aren't limited to Abbot Pass, says Christoph Dietzfelbinger, who has guided since the '80s in British Columbia's Coast Range.

"I think it will eventually become a place where you just don't go," says Gudjonson. "It was the access point for dozens of routes."Lower snowpacks and increased melting changes the shape and angle of glaciers, making them more prone to avalanches. Snow bridges allowing alpinists to safely cross crevasses are weakened.

"It's OK in the summer — you can see the ice. But the real issue is the thinner snowpack in the winter."

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