Had a chat with an old timer last week that really made me think

I was hiking the Timberline Trail around Mount Hood and stopped to talk to this guy who must have been in his 70s. He told me he'd been doing that loop since the 1980s and said the glaciers have shrunk so much you can barely recognize the route now. It hit different because I'd only noticed little changes year to year, but he saw the whole picture... It made me wonder, how much have the trails you guys hike changed over the decades?

3 comments

3 Comments

julia_anderson1mo ago

Wait, did your buddy have a similar experience out there? My friend Dave hiked the Wonderland Trail around Rainier back in 2019 and said some old guy showed him photos from the 70s where the glaciers came way further down the valley. He told me you could actually see where the ice used to scrape the rock, and now it's all bare gravel and these weird little ponds that weren't there before. Said it felt like looking at a different mountain altogether, not just a smaller glacier. Wild how a few decades can totally change the whole view.

vera5141mo ago

Oh man, that sounds exactly like what my buddy saw up on Mount Baker last summer.

daniel_martin1mo ago

Are people really this impressed by a few decades of change? I've been hiking around the Cascades since the mid 90s and yeah, the glaciers have pulled back some, but the mountains aren't exactly disappearing overnight. Seems like this whole thing gets blown way out of proportion sometimes. You look at old photos and then you go out there now and sure, things look different, but that's just how nature works. It's not like we're talking about some dramatic catastrophe here, it's just normal change over time. I think people get caught up in the panic without really putting it in perspective.