St. Mary’s Glacier has completely melted for first time in over a century

If you’ve ever hiked the trail above Idaho Springs to find snow in the middle of July, or watched people ski and snowboard in shorts on a random Tuesday in August, you already know St. Mary’s Glacier. Or, more accurately, you knew it. Because for the first time in at least 100 years, it’s gone.

The perennial snowfield (scientists will be quick to tell you it’s technically not a glacier) sitting at about 11,236 feet below James Peak in the Arapaho National Forest has completely melted away. Idaho Springs resident Jeremy Elder hiked up on Sept. 14 and found nothing but bare rock and a trickle of water where snow had survived every summer for over a century. Another Coloradan who had skied St. Mary’s more than 100 times over the past 30 years hit it on Sept. 1, and when he came back on Sept. 16, it was gone. Just like that.

The culprit? A brutal one-two punch of Colorado’s worst snowpack on record followed by the hottest summer in 132 years of NOAA data, topping records set in 1936 and 2021. The South Platte River Basin’s snowpack peaked at just 8.5 inches of snow water equivalent on March 17, well below the normal 16.1 inches that typically doesn’t hit until late April. From March 21 to May 4, daily low snowpack records were broken every single day. Then summer showed up swinging, with an average June-through-August temperature of 69.4 degrees statewide. St. Mary’s never stood a chance.

Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University who has been watching the snowfield via satellite imagery all summer, told the Colorado Sun he saw this coming. “The savings account has essentially been drained,” he said. The snowfield will reform when winter snow returns, but McGrath warns that rebuilding gets harder every year in a warming climate. Colorado is home to 14 named glaciers, and researchers say the state could lose all of them by 2080.

St. Mary’s has been a Colorado landmark since at least 1902, and for decades it was home to an actual ski resort with three lifts, a T-bar, a snack bar and a rental shop that operated from the 1930s until 1986. More recently it was one of the Front Range’s most beloved summer hikes, that rare spot where you could throw a snowball in August just 45 minutes from Denver. It’ll snow again this winter. It always does. But whether St. Mary’s can keep coming back year after year is a question nobody wants to hear the answer to.