Among the many dramatic peaks of the West, few mountains stand out like Mount Shasta in the northernmost reaches of California. Shasta erupts from the landscape, a solo peak with no other mountains nearby to obscure its height or provide any sense of scale. One can spot the summit from a hundred miles to the south, its snow-white tip soaring above the oak savanna. Comparison to The Hobbit’s Lonely Mountain is inescapable. Someone has even installed a 20-foot-long metal dragon sculpture on the plains to the north of the peak.
Mount Shasta is home to seven named glaciers, including the longest glacier in California, which is also the first glacier in the continental United States to have been positively identified by modern scientists. The Whitney Glacier was christened by Clarence King, who led the first U.S. Geological Survey party up the summit and named the formation after Josiah Whitney, a preeminent 19th-century geologist. A “colossal cone of a burned-out volcano, springs upward from a plain … bearing upon its summit a cap of solid white” is how King described Shasta in The Atlantic Monthly. There is a photo dated Sept. 11, 1870, of the Whitney Glacier, its mounds of ice split with giant crevasses.
Today, the Mount Shasta glaciers, like glaciers across the West, are mostly shrinking. Long a symbol of permanence — just think of the term glacial pace — they are dwindling year by year. By the standard of geologic time, the glaciers’ diminishment is happening incredibly fast. By human reckoning, though, it’s slow enough to miss. A child born today might easily assume that Shasta’s rather paltry and patchy glaciers have always looked this way. Scientists call this “shifting baseline syndrome” — a technical term for what you might also call the great-getting-used-to, the way in which we so easily adapt and accommodate to worsening environmental conditions.
There is, however, a way to reveal such environmental change, to peel away the folds of time that cloak the present. For some 140 years, people have been taking pictures of glaciers from the same viewpoint, decade after decade. Re-photo projects like that make for rock-solid evidence of how Earth is being transformed by climate change. Even in the age of AI-generated images, it’s hard to argue with a century-long photographic record that’s right before your eyes.
Such records are essential for combating the shifting baseline syndrome that leads us to accept environmental loss. The best — truly, the essential — antidote to environmental amnesia is the preservation of history. The first drafts of natural history can come in many forms: photographs, journals, diaries, scientific records, landscape paintings, antique maps, old property deeds, even restaurant menus. The danger is that such source materials may turn out to be as ephemeral as the landscape features they chronicle.
The best — truly, the essential — antidote to environmental amnesia is the preservation of history.
A CITIZEN-SCIENTIST NAMED Phil Rhodes has been conducting re-photography of the Shasta glaciers since the 1970s, and he has what is very likely the largest private collection of Shasta glacier photos. Tall, lanky and earnest — and now in his 70s — Rhodes grew up in the Marin County suburb of Mill Valley, where he developed an early love of wild nature while exploring Corte Madera Creek as a child. He made his first trip to the Whitney Glacier in 1972 while studying geology at Humboldt State University (today’s Cal Poly Humboldt), and he was hooked immediately. “I quickly became aware that the glaciers on Mount Shasta were acting in a very unusual manner,” he said in one of our conversations. “And that led into a lot of scientific investigation as to why the glaciers were behaving the way they were.”
Inspired by a book titled Exploring Glaciers — With a Camera, Rhodes set up his first photo station near the Whitney Glacier in 1974. He eventually set up additional photo sites to capture some of the mountain’s other glaciers — the Bolam, the Hotlum, the Wintun — for a total of 14 locations. He thought of his work as a continuation of the history of amateur scientists who have studied glaciers, most obviously John Muir, people “who are considered to have a scientific expertise, but were not, technically speaking, professionals.”
From 1983 to 1988, Rhodes lived in the village of Mount Shasta and passed the summers as the caretaker of a hut that serves as a gateway for mountaineers attempting the summit. Even after he moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area to manage his family’s shipping-export business, he sustained the endeavor, faithfully making the four-and-a-half-hour drive northward by himself, climbing the mountain, usually alone, to reach his photo stations.
“What I did was try to make this definable by setting up these photo stations: taking the same photo year after year after year,” he said. “You can look at these photos, and you can see changes.”
Eventually life got in the way of the glacier photography. In the 2000s, he handed off the project to a graduate student in the Portland State Geology Department. And then, sometime around 2015 — no one can precisely remember the year — the grad student handed it over to some Forest Service rangers who were eager for a diversion.
And that’s how I ended up in the company of a Forest Service seasonal ranger named Forrest Coots, who kindly agreed to take me up the mountain one spring weekend so that I could see a photo station for myself.
Coots grew up in the area, and he knows the mountain better than perhaps anyone else alive. His Mount Shasta baseline starts with his earliest memories, and as we bounced up the furrowed backroads on the mountain’s north side, the ecological reminiscences poured out of him. He was born in 1981, and in just over 40 years he had witnessed so many changes. “I remember, as a kid, you never doubted that winter would come.” And now? One recent winter, he said, “We went 36 days without any precipitation. Like, dry as a bone.”
The dirt road petered out at the edge of a sandy wash, not far from a faded sign delineating the boundary of the Mount Shasta Wilderness. We pulled on our boots, strapped on our packs, and started up the mountain. Nearly all climbers approach the Shasta summit from the south, and the northside was an empty, trackless wilderness. Coots navigated us upslope through a combination of mountaineer’s instinct and memory. We wended up and down gullies and avalanche chutes and through dense stands of pine, many of which were dead or stressed, their needle tips brown and crisp.
He pointed to the southeast. “That’s the Bolam Glacier. I doubt it will be here at the end of my lifetime. The Hotlum — maybe. The Whitney — maybe. But not the Bolam. It’ll be gone.”
“That’s the Bolam Glacier. I doubt it will be here at the end of my lifetime.”
WE WERE NOW WELL PAST the tree line, in a sere landscape of dirt, rock and ice. Coots guided us to a bench of rock above a tiny ice pond. The Whitney Glacier flowed above us, its ice bright white and digital blue. “We’re here,” he said. “This is the spot.”
It took me a beat to understand. Coots pointed to a salmon-colored, medium-sized boulder at the edge of the shelf. Photo Station Whitney #1, it turned out, was a completely anonymous, completely ordinary rock situated in the middle of nowhere. It could’ve been any stone in the world.
This one perfectly average boulder had, for decades, been a vantage point for witnessing and recording the world transforming. But the solid rock was ephemeral. An anchor to understanding the history of one of the most iconic peaks in California was held by little more than the thin thread of lived memory.
During my time with Coots, I had been able to piece together more of the story of the Shasta glaciers comparative photography project. It was an admirable tale of citizen science and bootstrap history, of people trying to resist the pull of ecological amnesia. It was inspiring to think about how Rhodes (“the foremost expert on Shasta’s glaciers,” in Coots’ words) had spent so much energy making a record of these vanishing forces of nature. All of that work on his own dime and in his spare time. This, I imagined, is how environmental memory holds on from one generation to the next — through the often-thankless work of people trying to preserve remembrances worth keeping.
Except that sometimes memory doesn’t hold. Nearly all the Shasta glacier photos from 2015 to 2019 were missing, placed on a thumb drive that someone misplaced. It was a loss that, Coots said, had left Rhodes “distraught.”
The Earth Said Remember Me
By Jason Dove Mark
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W.W. Norton & Co., 2026.
And then the project slipped still further. The summer after he guided me up the mountain, Coots quit his Forest Service job. Responsibility for re-photography fell to Nick Meyers, the lead climbing and wilderness ranger for Mount Shasta, but staffing shortfalls and bad weather have made it difficult for him and his crew to continue the record. They photographed only “a handful” of the sites in 2023 and 2024, Meyers told me in an email, and missed many in 2025. The project “hasn’t come to a halt, but we don’t always have the capacity” to visit all of the sites, he wrote, adding that the agency remains committed to the project and welcomes volunteer help. For now, though, the photo station at the base of the Whitney Glacier has reverted to what it had been for millennia: a plain old rock.
At one point, a partial set of Rhodes’ Mount Shasta photos had been transferred to Andrew Fountain, an eminent glaciologist at Portland State University. But even that was a kind of evidentiary purgatory. Fountain told me that over the years, he has collected more than 10,000 glacier photos. Some of them can be viewed on his website, Glaciers of the American West. Many of them, however, sit unseen on data servers and hard drives.
And while Glaciers of the American West does allow people a chance to glimpse glacier loss via comparative photography, the interface is clunky, the images are hard to navigate, and the site hasn’t been updated in years — the result, Fountain said, of a lack of resources, especially now that he’s retired. If you go to the site’s Glacier RePhoto Project and click on the photo gallery for Mount Shasta, you get a 404 error message. The galleries of Mount Hood and Mount Rainier are also busted. “I’d like to get that site going again,” Fountain told me, a weariness in his voice.
If a glacier melts off a mountain, and there’s little publicly available visual evidence of it, did it ever exist?
Fountain told me that for much of his career he had avoided such thinking. He approached his research with a “kind of academic remove.” Eventually, though, he realized that “in the near future, like maybe 2070 or whatever, glaciers will get so small that nobody will read my work.” The realization led him to “a certain depression.” He told me, “In a way, frankly, it is encouraging me to work a little more feverishly, because right now what I’m doing is developing an inventory of all the glaciers in the Western U.S., trying to tie down where they all are and how big they are. It might be a map of what times used to be.”
When Coots and I were clambering down off the Whitney Glacier, the sound of spilling water was all around us. The spring melt was underway, and countless freshets flowed downhill. The glacier was melting beneath our feet — and we were the only ones there to experience it.
A story remains alive only so long as it’s retold. Our histories are a lot like glaciers: They are living only if they stay on the move.
This article is adapted from The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet. Copyright (c) 2026 by Jason Dove Mark. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company Inc. All rights reserved.
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