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It no longer looks as it once did, the field of ice dashed against a rocky sheet where Jordan Carter played as a boy.
He can recall family hikes to the mountain peak, the blue ice he walked under along the glacier s edges, the joy of sliding down the snow on his boots. To a tourist, Kokanee Glacier might appear the same today as in decades past, but Jordan knows better.
The Carter family has deep roots in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. Duncan Carter was a British horticulturist who searched the park for samples of alpine plants in the 1930s. His son John Carter was the park s first stationed ranger in the 1970s.
Jordan Carter, one of John s two sons, spent his childhood summers exploring the park while his father worked. John wrote books about hiking the Kootenays, and his family tagged along to scout trails. Thanksgivings at the park were an annual family trip, and hikes to the top of the glacier were common.
Carter is 38 years old now, with two children of his own. His father died at the park in 1996 after he triggered an avalanche while skiing, but Carter continues to care deeply for the playground of his youth and still makes the same trips with his young family.
That s a real way I feel I can really relive my childhood. Kokanee is like our backyard.
But that backyard is changing: One of Canada s most iconic glaciers and a place of historical and cultural significance to the Kootenays, is rapidly melting.
Ben Pelto, a glaciologist at the University of British Columbia, has studied the province s glaciers since 2014 and makes annual trips to Kokanee, which he says has lost approximately 16 per cent of its mass over seven years.
Extreme temperature changes have quickened its demise the glacier shrunk by six per cent, or the equivalent of almost 2.5 metres, during the 2021 heat dome.
At its current rate of melt, Pelto estimates the glacier will be gone within 30-to-50 years. If global warming can be kept below the Paris Climate Agreement goal of 1.5 C compared to pre-industrial temperatures, Pelto thinks some snow may still gather at the glacier s current location.
But Kokanee Glacier will disappear for good, he says.
Carter has also noticed the glacier s increased melt. The hike to the ice used to be a relatively easy day trip for him as a child. Now Kokanee Glacier has receded too far up the mountain for his own children to reach, and he s left to watch a key place in the Carter family s history slowly vanish.
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