Glacier Nation Founder Leads St. Mary’s Snowfield Funeral

Steamboat Springs —The obvious narrative surrounding the disappearance of St. Mary’s Glacier is one of scientific loss: a perennial snowfield, located just an hour west of Denver, finally succumbed to heat this September. But to hear it tell it, the real story isn’t about the ice. It’s about the silence that follows when the ice is gone.

Marcela Fernandez, the founder of the international climate movement Glacier Nation, didn’t fly to Colorado to measure the remaining ice. She came to listen.

“Who accompanies St. Mary’s now? Who is with her? Who’s listening and capturing the last drop of water, or what she wants to tell us?” Fernandez asked during a ceremony held at the site last week.

The question is whether we are actually listening, or if we’re just waiting for the temperature gauge to break.

Fernandez organized the event after seeing headlines about the snowfield’s disappearance during New York City Climate Week. She canceled plans to visit glaciers at Mount Shasta in California to make the trip to Colorado. For Fernandez, the loss of St. Mary’s is a pattern. From Columbia to Colorado, glaciers are disappearing.

“We believe that every time that a glacier or a perennial snowfield will disappear, what we should be able to collect are the lessons that we need to learn,” she said.

This is a contrarian take because it suggests the problem isn’t the warming itself, but our inability to process the grief. We treat the melting as a data point. The activists at St. Mary’s treated it as a funeral.

Morgan Sierra Mae, who grew up in Evergreen, sat cross-legged on the rocks where the snowfield had resided for a century. She sang an original song, her voice echoing through the rocky valley.

“I melt away, I melt away, I melt away — don’t forget my name,” she sang.

The math holds up if you view the snowfield as a teacher. It taught us what summer looked like for a hundred years. Now that it’s gone, we’re left with a curriculum we never finished reading.

That depends on who you ask if the ceremony was effective. For the eight people who formed a circle and held hands, it was a moment of connection. For the rest of us, it’s a reminder that the mountain is still there, even if the snow isn’t.

The valley stretches out behind Mae, completely empty of snow for the first time in at least 100 years. The stream babbles. The breeze whistles. The mountain waits.

Fernandez leaves us with the final word, a challenge rather than a conclusion:

“We believe that every time that a glacier or a perennial snowfield will disappear, what we should be able to collect are the lessons that we need to learn.”