Locust (33 page)

The climb up to the glacier was tedious and treacherous. Clambering over car-sized boulders was tiring, but when they shifted and settled with stony groans, the adrenaline rush provided a surge of energy that kept us moving upward at a brisk pace. Cresting the moraine at 9,700 feet, we sighted the glacier. It lay at the base of a gargantuan amphitheater, the sheer cliffs rising a hundred feet above the graying ice. The glacier was cradled between the rock walls, and we discovered that even during these long summer days the sunlight managed to creep into this recess for only a few hours. Even so, the amount of exposed ice had shrunk to about eleven acres. There was a much larger expanse of ice beneath the rock slides that had littered the sides of the glacier as it receded, but finding anything beneath this jumble of scree and stone would be impossible. Our 1972 map showed an area of ice ten times larger than the one we had encountered, meaning that the glacier had receded by 90 percent in just sixteen years.

The first, beautifully preserved grasshopper that Larry found in a shallow pit in the ice generated tremendous excitement. I gently lifted
the specimen from its icy grave using the blade of my ice ax to avoid contaminating it with oils from my hand. It was in remarkable condition, and I could immediately see that it was in the genus
Melanoplus
. But the tiny cerci were in the distinct shape of a cowboy boot, completely unlike those of
spretus
. In fact, the creature appeared to be
M. infantilis,
a prairie species not known to form swarms or fly for long distances. This was a most surprising discovery, hardly what I was hoping to find, but intriguing in its own right. Within minutes, Jeff called out that he’d found a body, and then Dick shouted from above us that he’d come across two more. Each specimen was put in a small vial for later examination, as our time was better invested in collecting as much as possible rather than stopping to identify each grasshopper. And
grasshopper
seemed to be the right term—all of the specimens appeared to have been deposited in recent weeks; their colors were intact and their legs and wings were all attached. Radiocarbon dating later confirmed the recent origin of our specimens. Dick’s ice pits turned up empty, although he delighted in the shower of shards that flew during his excavations. And the
bergshrund
—the crevasse that forms at the top of a glacier as it pulls away from the rock face—provided a view into the glacier but gave no evidence of deeper layers of insects.

In the evenings, I worked by lantern light to identify the day’s collection. After three days of searching, we had managed to gather 134 grasshoppers. Among these were twenty different species, most of which we also found in the meadows above camp. Clearly, the majority of grasshoppers in the glacier were alpine species, recently blown up the valley and onto the ice. The relatively low elevation of the glacier and the lush meadows probably accounted for this chronic deposition of insects and the name of the glacier. However, there were a half dozen surprises—rangeland species not previously known to engage in long-distance flights. A couple of species had been previously considered flightless, having only tiny stubs for wings. In both cases, fully winged individuals were considered quite rare, and the fact that they could disperse for miles was not even imagined. Perhaps the most intriguing finding was a set of 40 specimens of
Aulocara elliotti,
the bigheaded grasshopper. This is a serious pest of grasslands, which had
never been reported at high elevations. Moreover, these specimens had wings that were a third longer than normal. The rather abundant, long-winged individuals provided the first, circumstantial evidence of a migratory phase, perhaps even swarming, in this grasshopper.

Although Grasshopper Glacier had not yielded any ancient specimens or long-lost locusts, the weather was balmy and the creek was yielding trout to supplement our fare. So we stretched our expedition to encompass another, unnamed glacier. Our first view of this site had been profoundly unnerving and very nearly disastrous. On our last day at Grasshopper Glacier we climbed to the apex of the ice and onto a steep and crumbling slope. This 150-foot chute led to a notch in the rock wall behind the glacier, through which, if our maps were accurate, we figured that it should be possible to view a glacier on the other side of the ridge. The plan was to see if we could access this other body of ice by climbing up and over the wall surrounding Grasshopper Glacier. Larry, Jeff, and I started the ascent, but it was soon apparent that between the narrow chute and the loose rock, someone would end up getting clobbered in a shower of shale. To make matters worse, the slope became perilously steep within a couple dozen yards of the notch.

Larry was the strongest climber, so I sent him ahead and then ducked behind a boulder with Jeff to avoid the hail of rocks knocked free during the ascent. The sporadic avalanches assured us that he was making progress, but our hopes of a suitable access route to the other glacier were fading. When the scree stopped sliding down the chute, we assumed he’d made it to the notch, which was just out of sight of our precarious position. After ten minutes of quiet, we began to worry. Coming down from the notch should have been faster than going up, and Larry was only supposed to be making a quick reconnaissance, not exploring the other side. After nearly twenty minutes, we heard the clatter of sliding rocks and knew that he was on his way down. As he came around the boulder, he looked uncharacteristically shaken.

“We thought you’d stopped for lunch,” I joked.

“Nearly lost my lunch is more like it,” he replied.

“What happened?” I asked, as the color slowly returned to his face.

“I got to the notch and reached up to pull myself onto the ledge so I could see through it and over the other side,” he began, “and as I pulled my head and shoulders into the gap and looked over, the world fell a thousand feet.”

“It fell? What do you mean?” I asked.

“The other side of the ridge drops straight down to a valley. So, as you cling to the foot-wide ledge of the notch, behind you is a slope of loose rock and in front of you the world drops into oblivion.” He paused while we tried to picture the dizzying perspective. “I’ve never had vertigo like that,” Larry said. “It was all I could do to hang onto the ledge. That’s why I was up there for so long.”

Here was a guy who had spent his days logging, hunting, and fishing. He’d hiked, climbed, and wandered for hundreds of miles. If Larry had been intimidated by this route, there was no way the rest of us were going up and over.

“Did you see the other glacier?” I asked, hoping at least that he’d found the object of our climb.

“Yeah. It’s plastered onto the side of a slope, well to our northeast. This shortcut over the ridge is insane. But I think the ridge drops off to a pass further to the east. Maybe that would get us there,” he replied.

“Let’s work our way back down and check out the maps,” I said, hoping that we might find a way onto the other glacier that would be less traumatic.

As it turned out, the expanse of meadows above our camp led to the pass that Larry had suggested. It was a tiring climb up the soggy, frost-heaved meadows, but those two hummocky miles were far easier than the ascent to the ridge above Grasshopper Glacier. The glacier that we found covered an area twice that of its better-known sister, but we collected only a couple of grasshoppers. It was clear that being big was not all it took for an ice field to serve as an effective insect trap. The critical factor was whether the glacier was oriented within a valley where the prevailing winds would carry grasshoppers onto the ice.

With this factor in mind, we focused on a third Grasshopper Glacier in 1989. Appropriately named, but never investigated by an entomologist, this body of ice lay at a slightly higher elevation than the
first Grasshopper Glacier. And in the late 1950s, it had been at least twice as large as its somewhat distant and much more famous neighbor. Flanked by 12,000-foot peaks, the high elevation deep-freeze should have kept its contents in good shape for the last few centuries. The glacier looked reasonably accessible if we followed its long, gradual drainage, and establishing a horse-supplied campsite near its base appeared to be feasible. Although fastidiously avoiding any public allusion to numerology, we had to wonder whether three would be our lucky number.

 

Inside the timbered lodge of the Squaw Creek Ranch just outside Cody, Wyoming, we unfurled the topographic maps that revealed the lair of Grasshopper Glacier. The outfitter that we’d hired to pack us into the site evinced complete confidence, assuring us that he could get us at least to the edge of Black Canyon Lake, the mile-long body of meltwater fed by the glacier.

“No problem,” he declared.

“And if you can’t get us beyond the near end of the lake, then which shore should we take to get up the canyon?” I asked.

“Stick to the west side of the lake,” he replied. “It’s not nearly as steep.”

From the far end of the lake, it was a mile to the glacier—or at least to where the toe had been in 1956. With recession, the glacier had almost surely retreated up the canyon. Confident that our plan was as well conceived as possible, I took up Jim’s challenge of a cribbage game. Jim Wangberg was my department head and had wanted to join the expeditions for some time. This year, he’d managed to set aside the time—and with his penchant for swimming, he certainly had the lean build of a man who would be able to make the haul up the canyon. Larry, my Man Friday, was along again, and by now we were nearly telepathic in the field, each anticipating the other’s position and needs. His brother, Bill, was the other newbie on the team. If there was ever a need to demonstrate the fickleness of genetics, Larry and Bill were my living examples. Tall and lanky, with dark wavy locks, Bill bore almost no resemblance to Larry’s sturdy, broad-shouldered build and straight sandy hair.

The gear and horses were loaded into the trucks and trailers the next morning, and we drove over the Chief Joseph highway—one of the most scenic roads in the country. From the crest of the highway we could see a sharp promontory among the rugged mountains in the distance. At over 12,000 feet, Beartooth Peak jutted from the northern flank of Grasshopper Glacier, which was tucked safely into the recessions of Black Canyon. We dropped into Montana, parked at the trailhead, and prepared the pack mules and riding horses for the thirteen-mile trek into Black Canyon Lake. The mid-August morning was bright and sunny, until the trail turned southward into the canyon. Within a few hundred yards of entering the wide mouth of the canyon, the forest became a dark maze of fallen trees. A windstorm had created a giant’s game of pickup sticks, and there was no possibility of getting the horses through the tangle of trunks. We turned back and made camp at the edge of a sunny meadow, well below the canyon. The next day would be the most trying we had faced in our search for the Rocky Mountain locust.

We began our trek to Grasshopper Glacier early. The three miles up to Black Canyon Lake required a couple of tedious hours picking our way through forest. Whatever trail might once have wound its way up the mouth of the canyon, it was lost among the snarl of fallen trees. We did not realize until we finished the last hundred yards of our climb over a jumble of rock that we were ascending the immense—and now largely overgrown—terminal moraine of the glacier. Like an Ice Age bulldozer, the glacier had shoved a huge earthen dam into the mouth of Black Canyon. Behind this mound, marking the furthest advance of the ice, lay Black Canyon Lake, a two-mile-long jade-green stretch of frigid water. From the terminal moraine, there was no sign of the glacier. But our maps indicated that the canyon curved to the west, forming a deep alcove into which, we presumed, the ice had retreated in the last few decades. Heeding the advice of the outfitter, we headed along the west side of the lake, which, in the distance, appeared to be a lush alpine meadow. Appearances can be deceiving.

The “meadow” turned out to be krumholz—thickets of gnarled trees, stunted by brutal cold and twisted by constant wind. Pushing,
stumbling, and occasionally climbing our way through two miles of this Lilliputian forest took more than two hours. We stopped for lunch at the far end of the lake, still unable to see any ice above us. Searching for a flat, dry place to eat, Jim came across a skull resting alongside one of the rivulets feeding the lake. “This is where the mountain goats come to die,” he joked, holding up his prize. Between our weariness from the morning’s trek and the ominous clouds gathering at the rim of the canyon, the skull seemed an ill omen.

We began to ascend the narrowing canyon, climbing over an interminable series of moraines, marking the one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back retreat of the glacier. These thirty-foot battlements of loose rock and crumbling soil seemed to be the dying glacier’s way of keeping intruders from reaching its sanctuary at the end of the canyon. As we worked our way up, the clouds dropped into the canyon and a light mist began to fall. By mid-afternoon, we had reached remnant patches of rotting ice tucked between the moraines at 10,000 feet. Cold, wet, and tired, we searched these patches and recovered a dozen fragments of grasshoppers, mostly legs and mandibles. With one final push up the canyon, we worked our way to the top of a particularly impressive moraine, and Grasshopper Glacier came into view, still a mile in the distance. We could see that the glacier, shrouded by clouds and mist, was now reduced to a sheer slab of deeply crevassed ice clinging to the deepest wall of the cirque. Like a slashed corpse, the pale body of the glacier had shrunk to barely a third of the area that it was in 1956, as a result of a continued warming trend in the West. Not wanting to be caught in the canyon for the night, we headed down.

On the return journey, we passed around the east side of Black Canyon Lake. This route meant two miles of scrambling over scree-covered slopes, but at least we didn’t have to bushwhack through the krumholz. We all would have made it back to camp by sunset, except Jim suffered a painful groin pull while clambering over the shifting rock. Larry and I moved ahead to prepare a hot dinner, while Bill helped Jim make his way out of the canyon. A steaming pot of chili and a lip-blistering cup of coffee were waiting as they dragged into camp with the last slate-gray hints of dusk.