The Weeping Glacier | Rappelling into the Melting Ice Caves of Athabasca

29th December 2025 | Words by Aila Taylor | Photos by Aila Taylor and Noah Korver

“What time is it?” Noah muttered next to me.

“4.30am,” I groaned. “Definitely time to get up.”

I sat up on our make-shift bed in the back of the car and pushed open the misted door. As if on cue, another car rolled into the car park and our friend Kade got out.

“Feeling ready?” He asked with a smirk, bounding out of the car with far too much energy for this time of morning.

“I guess,” I mumbled reluctantly. “I hate mornings.” My breath fogged in the air as I put more layers on and laced my boots. The sky was scattered with stars, and 10 minutes later the three of us were following the milky way up the valley. Dark peaks loomed on either side, watching us inquisitively. We strode up the terminal moraine in silence, packs heavy and legs burning with the sudden exercise. Even in my half-asleep state, I noted the sign stating “2001” shortly after the car park. It marked where the toe of the Athabasca glacier was when I was born. Now, just a quarter of a century later, it took us an additional half hour to reach the toe. The knowledge rested uneasily at the back of my throat.

The Athabasca is an arm of the Columbia icefield, the largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains whose meltwaters feed three separate oceans (the Arctic, the Pacific and the Atlantic). It is a king of glaciers – but even kings can fall. The thought followed me like a wraith as I pushed on up the moraine, hands on rucksack straps, feet on rock, and navigated my way through the night.

Finding the Moulin

By the time we reached the ice, the sky was stained by the cobalt dye of twilight. Either side of us, vertical cliffs grew in stature as if the mountains were yawning with the dawn. A cold wind blew into our faces, and my fatigue morphed into anticipation as I started bounding over the ice.

“I think it’s this way!” I shouted, leaping over some meltwater channels and veering to the right. “No, actually. This way.” I corrected myself, steering sharply to the left.

Noah and Kade did a remarkable job of following me without complaint. Our objective for the day was to descend a moulin in the glacier – a large hole where surface meltwater drops down a vertical shaft into a network of ice caves below. I had already been on two recce trips in previous weeks, locating moulins ready for our descent mission. Though I had found many, I had one particular hole in mind – a large, cavernous opening in the middle of the glacier. The seracs of the ice fall grew larger as we approached, and with one more leap across a meltwater channel, I found the hole I was looking for.

Descending into the Ice

“Aha! Here we are!” I announced proudly. “The largest of the moulins!”

We made light work of getting our gear set up. Kade and I chipped away at the ice on the glacier’s surface, accessing the firmer ice below that would provide more secure anchors. We placed our ice screws, tying the ropes in while the first rays of sun bathed the surrounding summits in a bronze light, and began to descend.

I abseiled down slowly, savouring the experience of the ice walls rising up around me as the circle of sky above grew smaller.

“Wahoo!” I whooped, landing on the ice floor at the bottom. We had hit the jackpot. An enormous horizontal walking passage continued into the glacier ahead of me, and the wind that followed me down the moulin ushered me into it.

Although the rift was at least 5 metres tall, it was very thin, and the ice walls curved in an S-shape that meant we had to contort our bodies and walk sideways to move through it. The lower section of the keyhole passage was often so thin that our feet wouldn’t fit inside to walk along the floor, so we used a combination of knee-bars, elbow-bars and foot-bars to traverse above the gap. We squirmed and shuffled our way through until we rounded a corner and met a deep pothole of water cascading over a vertical drop.

“Damn,” I cursed, “Do we have more screws?”

“We do,” Kade replied, “But we’re out of rope.”

There was nothing to be done but to ascend back out of the moulin. We started making our way out, once again contorting our bodies to fit through the ice. As we moved, I realised that the mountains will never bend for us – though many throughout history have tried. We bend for them.

The Glacier Melts in Real Time

We emerged into the base of the 30-metre entrance shaft to find a small waterfall running down the meltwater channel next to our rope, despite it being dry when we descended just an hour earlier. Already, the ice was melting. The speed with which the temperature had risen was demonstrated when Kade simply pulled one of our ice-screws out of the ice, without having to unscrew it at all.

‘Wow! I can’t believe they’re melting out already!’ I exclaimed. ‘Maybe it’s a good thing we turned around when we did.’

Before long, we were sitting on the ice on the surface, tucking into brie, baguette and red wine. I made a point of showing my Canadian friends the best of European mountain snacks – whilst gazing up at the immense ice fall in front of us. The air temperature continued to rise as seracs on the nearby cliffs collapsed with increasing frequency, scattering the mountainside in shattered ice.

It was like watching someone you love crumble in front of you, and being unable to help them. The Athabasca Glacier has receded by almost 2 kilometres and lost more than half of its volume in the last 150 years. The loss is accelerated by frequent droughts and ash from wildfires. The latter darkens the surface of the glacier so that it absorbs more sunlight, accelerating melt by up to 10%. In 2024, wildfires that ravaged Jasper National Park – in which the Athabasca is situated – highlighted the impacts of the climate crisis on the region. The fires scattered soot and ash across the Columbia icefield, as if they were dressing the ice for its own funeral. Peering at the ice, I found ash still strewn across it. This is what it means to be a young mountaineer in the 21st century. It is to explore, to climb, to laugh and drink wine as many before me have done – but it is also to lose. To grieve. To bear witness.

By the time we finished our lunch, the small waterfall beside the rope had become a raging torrent. I thought, at first, that it seemed like the glacier was weeping. But it was far greater than that. The water churned fiercely, cutting its way through ancient ice that began freezing over 200,000 years ago. Now it thawed with a guttural scream.

Return to the Glacier’s Heart

A month later, I went back with some other friends to push the same moulin further. It was the day after our first proper dump of snow, and the temperature remained below zero all day. The weak winter sun couldn’t melt through the blanket of snow on top of the glacier, let alone the ice beneath it this time. The world was still and silent.

My friend Katie and I brought ropes to abseil further into the moulin. Everything seemed to be going well this time – it was past the glacier melt season of summer, water levels were low, our ice screws weren’t melting out, and we brought 7mm wetsuits to stay warm in the water beneath the ice. But after a few more pitches, our ropes ran out again. Undeterred from the call of the void, we free climbed the following pitches with axes and crampons. Many of the pitches were awkward shapes, sometimes so narrow that we had to kick our feet directly below each other whilst scrunching our shoulders in to fit down. We tunneled into the heart of the glacier, past junctions where passages from other moulins intersected with ours, and wading through pools of waist deep water, until we once again reached a larger pitch that wouldn’t have been sensible to free climb. The ice caves seemed endless. We turned around, leaving the rest to be explored another day – but still satisfied with the incredible passages we had seen.

A Living, Shifting Dragon

As if to remind us of just how small we were, a loud bang suddenly reverberated through the passage. The ice seemed to shake with the sound, and we looked around us – half expecting to see the ceiling come crashing down. Somewhere close by, there had been a collapse, though we didn’t find it on our way out. This was different to the limestone caves that Katie and I had both spent years of our lives exploring around the world. It was clear that we were within a moving, shifting, living thing that coiled around the Rocky Mountains like a sleeping dragon.

Katie had previously explored some of the moulins on Athabasca in 2023, when she was assisting NASA with robot-testing. They used the moulins to simulate the exploration of icy moons like Saturn’s Enceladus, so that the robots can search for signs of life in previously unexplored areas of the universe. Somewhat ironically, the Athabasca nestles beneath the snow-domed peak of Mount Andromeda, a constant reminder of the vastness of the universe.

Despite this, the glacier itself is a huge tourist attraction. The 93 highway that leads to it is well-known as one of the most beautiful roads in the world, and tourists pile onto the edge of the glacier every day in bright red tour buses. It is a polarised place: divided between rock and ice, the past and the future, the known and the unknown. As Katie and I twisted through the ice, passing tubes and tunnels leading off in all directions, it struck me that even in an age where the boundaries of exploration are continually pushed and expanded, there is still so much more to learn on our doorstep. Much of that knowledge begins, and ends, with the ice.

The International Year of Glaciers' Preservation

2025 was the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, as designated by the United Nations. The year aimed to highlight the accelerated loss of ice and permanent snow around the world, alongside the catastrophic social, economic and environmental impacts this brings. It included the release of the 2025 World Water Development Report, focused on high mountains and glaciers, an international conference for glaciers’ preservation in Tajikistan, and many other events that were part of a coordinated global push to raise awareness for glacier loss. This coincided with a year frequented by glacier-related disasters, from glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) in Nepal to a village in the Swiss Alps that was almost entirely destroyed by a glacier collapse and landslide.

Our mountains are changing at an alarmingly rapid rate, and as mountaineers we witness these changes more frequently than much of the global population. But even as I waded through meltwater, my palms pressed to the ice on either side of the passage, my grief became overshadowed by gratitude. While we may have lost a lot, we have so much left to lose. We are lucky to have so much to fight for.

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Aila (formerly Anna) Taylor is an outdoor writer and mountain activist. She has previously published in the Guardian, The Independent, Vice and i-D magazines, amongst others. As an avid caver, hiker and cold-water swimmer, Aila is passionate about improving accessibility to the outdoors in addition to spreading awareness about the threats currently facing mountain regions.