The great Durrand Glacier system

The entire glacier system at Durrand Glacier consists of 14 different glaciers, which are for the most part connected by wider or smaller sidearms. The entire glaciated area at Durrand Glacier covers an impressive 42 square kilometers. The two most striking glaciers of all of them are the deep Zwilling's Glacier and Baal Glacier. Both glaciers are steep and therefore have fast flowing ice, creating massive labyrinths of glacial crevasses and glacial serac fields. Both glaciers are over 200 meters deep.

The Durrand Glacier itself is a much more gentle glacier and because of its overall low incline its flowing speed is much less than observed at many other glaciers in the Durrand Glacier area. However the Durrand Glacier is the largest single glacier in the area and at its deepest point, half way in between Mirror Lake Ridge and Forbidden Peak, it has an estimated depth of 150 to 200 meters.

Due to global warming all glaciers around the world, regardless of size, are melting. This includes the Durrand Glacier. During warm summers the southerly and westerly facing glaciers can lose as much as 4 meters in thickness at 2100 meters elevation, while low elevation glaciers such as the Dismal Glacier can also lose at 1800 meters elevation up to 20 meters in length. Northerly facing glaciers such as the impressive Ruth Glacier and many others are less exposed to direct sun radiation and heat and therefore retreating substantially slower.

The Durrand Glacier has many similarities with the great Illecillewaet Glacier at Rogers Pass. In the year of 1900 both glaciers flowed down to approximately the same elevation of 1550 meters and today both glaciers are at 2050 meters elevation. A large glacial retreat in a relatively short time: 500 vertical meters or 1.6 kilometers in distance. The area where most of the glacier has been lost is very steep cliffy terrain which due to its lower elevation is exposed to increased valley heat.

At Durrand Glacier the low-point of 1550 meters in 1900 was at the lower end of the open bowl directly below the Twin Falls and the base of the Tumbledown Gully. At that time the building site of the Durrand Glacier Chalet was very close to the edge of the, most likely, very wild broken glacial ice of Durrand Glacier.

However, this was not the only glacier close to the site of today's Durrand Glacier Chalet. The glacial ice flowing off Woolsey Peak also reached well below the present tree-line. The Woolsey Glacier, which today is only a tiny pocket glacier and has not much more than a few years left, reached to below the trail which leads up the west slopes to the Durrand Glacier Chalet.

Creek under the ice of Durrand Glacier

Durrand Glacier, 1985

Durrand Glacier, 2007

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