The Abbott Pass hut stood for decades in a rugged col between two iconic peaks, overlooking the limpid turquoise of Banff National Park's Lake Louise.Lake Louise — a destination for alpinists from around the world until the ground melted beneath it and forced its closure.researchers have now used a century’s worth of entries from the hut’s log to illuminate how climate change is erasing historic climbs, making others more dangerous and altering the face of Canadian mountaineering.
Hanly’s paper combines 6,283 trip reports left by alpinists in the Abbot Pass hut log with those in a modern climbers database. It covers from 1923 to 2024. “On Mount Edziza, the access to the summit ridge used to be a simple snow slope,” he says in an email. “Now it is a 30- to 70-metre-high slope of black water ice that requires full alpine ice gear.”
Gudjonson has seen that effect on the Wapta Icefield, a popular high-altitude glacier ski touring destination between Banff and Jasper, Alta. As well, areas that usually see deep, stable snowpacks now experience big dumps followed by long droughts, sometimes punctuated by rain or thaw. That creates snow layers and makes avalanche assessment even harder.“There seems to be more problem layers , more variability, more complexity.”