Soon after I moved to this area, I watched a local schoolteacher perform a rap geology lesson about the glaciers that formed this valley. “Ice, ice, baby!” he intoned as he threw down his moves. That joyful, tongue-in-cheek teaching shaped my relationship to this landscape. When I looked out my office window, it was the New Denver Glacier that grabbed my attention. When I walked the winter waterfront, I’d hear the wind howling across its face. When I swam out into the lake, its imposing presence would press on my heart. I responded by saying thanks: for meltwater waterfalls in spring, hanging valleys at dusk, dawn lighting its face. For the mystery.

Now that lovely rapping man is gone, and the glacier…well, New Denver Rock Face would be a more accurate name. There are a few tiny ice fields clinging high on the northern slopes; what remains is the ghost of a glacier, visible primarily in its absence, the huge swathes of bare rock left behind. 

Over the years, I’ve thought about “our” glacier, a lot. Changes are happening all over the world—huge, catastrophic changes, like the collapse of the Nepalese glacier just days ago—but this is the place where I see those worldwide changes firsthand. I try to pay attention, and I try to practice gratitude, even though I also feel loss and sometimes even despair. I don’t think it’s possible to avoid this stew of feelings; it’s normal and sacred.

The work is the same, really, for those we love. We attend to them, as they are, when they are with us. When they are gone, we visit and revisit our memories of them. It’s funny, how the memory of a good time can make us sad: the ghost of our joy visible in the shape of the loss left behind. This too is normal, and sacred.

Humans have always used ritual and monuments to mark these holy losses. A cenotaph, a favorite song, a candle burning, a park bench, a tree planted: we tether those now-invisible realities to an action or a place which reminds us of the sacredness of our losses, the gifts we’ve received. 

Yesterday, as a way of honouring the reality formerly known as the New Denver Glacier, I helped a friend install a waterfront glacial viewer. This is an apparatus through which to contemplate the New Denver Glacier as it fades from our lives. It’s a kind-of-telescope made of ice, and just like the glacier, it melts. Just like my friend’s rap performance, you have to be in the right place at the right time to catch it. It is a temporary expression of love and gratitude, dedicated to a temporary expression of mystery and beauty, held for a few hours in an old surveyor’s stand until it weeps itself away on the beach. 

I hope, when you stumble across that viewer in the coming weeks, you will allow yourself to mark the sacredness and gift of this: the New Denver Glacier in all its beauty and mystery, leaving us.