On a warm August morning, Michael Goldberg wore shorts as he skied for the 46th month in a row. It was on the snowfield on Mount Timpanogos — the mountain that towers over part of Utah County.
“Timp,” as it’s affectionately called, reaches 11,749 feet. This time of year, the snow sits near the peak, above a lake and fields of wildflowers. As Goldberg took off on his ski run, he yelled, “It’s actually not that bad!”
But on further reflection, he laughed and said it’s actually “absolutely horrible.” There are divots in the snow, plus a layer of dirt and small rocks that scrape skis.
He and other die-hard skiers call this pursuit of a monthly streak “turns all year,” and Goldberg said the community is growing in Utah.
But with hotter summers, how long will they be able to continue?
“There certainly is a little bit of a ‘clock is ticking’ aspect to the motivation to keep this up,” Goldberg said.
He has climate change on his mind “a lot.” So skiing every month “is almost a little bit of a tribute to the fact that this is probably not going to be possible as much in the future.”
The snowfield on Mount Timpanogos used to last through the summer much better, said University of Utah glaciologist Leif Anderson. “It's only in the last 20 years or so that we started having a non-permanent snow patch at Timp.”
Some call that area on Timpanogos a glacier, but Anderson said that’s not quite the case because sometimes it accumulates ice and sometimes it doesn’t.
Utah doesn’t have any true glaciers.
They retreated thousands of years ago. The mountain walls started to shed rock, which then covered the snow. Given enough time, Anderson noted, “you start to get these things that flow like they’re glaciers, but they're really a mix of rock and ice.”
They’re called rock glaciers. Today, the state has about 800-900 of them.
Timp’s ice is somewhere between a real glacier and a rock glacier. Anderson said it’s Utah’s only pseudo-glacier.
“It's a fascinating site, and it moves about one and a half feet or so per year.”
It's hard to say how long it and the state’s rock glaciers will be around. That could be a big problem, because Utah’s fate may be tied to the fate of these ice formations.
“Utah’s snowpack is going away,” said Scott Hotaling, a watershed scientist at Utah State University. And in a dry state, “snowpack is an incredibly important part of drinking water.”
Utah gets about 16% less annual snow now than it did in 1980. And rock glaciers could be “playing a much bigger role in our mountain water supply than people have previously been aware,” Hotaling said.
“So in the future, as the snowpack declines and the rock glaciers become increasingly important, it's really important to understand what [they are] currently contributing to water supply.”
There isn’t good data on Utah’s rock glaciers yet, but Hotaling is working on that with the Utah Geological Survey and other institutions.
What we do know is that rock glaciers are more resilient to climate change in Wyoming’s Teton Range.
True glaciers there lose more than 2 vertical feet of ice every year. Whereas the rock glaciers lose a third of a foot or less.
The difference is insulation. Rock and debris protect glaciers from the sun and dust. So could we give them more protection?
In other parts of the world, like Europe, “they actually roll out white tarps in the spring into summer to protect their snow fields and glaciers from climate change and warm conditions,” Hotaling said.
But to him, that’s not a large-scale solution. He has thought about using a thermal imaging drone to detect thinner ice or ice that’s closer to the surface. And then, “some targeted blasting or something.” He’s not sure though how that would work or how he feels about the ethics of blasting.
“I would say the solutions are more about, how do we use water more efficiently? How do we get by with less?”
As for Goldberg’s “turns all year” skiing, neither scientist knows how much longer that will be possible. Hotaling thinks it’s going to get “very difficult in the coming decades.” Anderson suspects year-round snow on Mount Timpanogos could end in the next couple of years.
In the meantime, Goldberg will try to keep up his monthly streak.
“I embrace the silliness of it all,” he said. “Like, I understand this is so frivolous, like we're just out there having a good time.”
